


What About Our Allies

by itsnotirony



Series: What About Our Allies [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: A knife!, Angst, Blood, Business cards, Gen, Guns, Inconsistent Worldbuilding, Lies and Deception, Magic, Malia is helpful, Mentioned Scott/Malia, Minor Character Death, Murder, Post-Season/Series 06, Trust Issues, University, Violence, a car accident, corey steals a book, dubious use of scientific terms, exactly one kidnapping, its theo's fault, more theft, this one is even less romantic im sorry, vague conversations, what the hell is a magician
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-15 04:41:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 21,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28557768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsnotirony/pseuds/itsnotirony
Summary: Corey uses a crisis to reflect on his place in the pack and how the perception of his own character affects the choices he makes.
Relationships: Corey Bryant/Mason Hewitt
Series: What About Our Allies [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2088570
Comments: 6
Kudos: 8





	1. This Threat Is Definitely Not Real What Are You Talking About

**Author's Note:**

> First off, I live in Britain. I only know what British universities are like. I was very careful not to mention pubs, and that's all the effort I'm going to go to.  
> Second, I studied a STEM subject and therefore know nothing about what studying humanities is like. There are essays, I assume?  
> Thankfully there isn't actually that much university stuff mentioned.

Corey kept his gaze fiercely focused on a textbook behind his tutor's head, its title sticking in his mind more than the words being spat at his face. _Origin of the Were_ _people_ _\---_

“I don't know if you will _ever_ be good enough, Bryant.”

– _\- A heuristic analysis of the evolution of supernatural humans and their allies._

It took Corey a moment to understand what his tutor had said: long enough to confirm the statement. He looked the tutor in the eyes then looked away again. It was hardly interesting –- the man's opinion of his essays --- because Corey was happy with his essays and Mason was happy with the few that he'd been allowed to read and that's all that mattered. He was good enough.

“If the next semester goes like this, I will recommend that you find a different major or, even better, a different university. I'm sorry,” the professor said, not sounding the least bit apologetic, “but that's the reality.”

“Are you sure you know what reality is?” Corey muttered under his breath.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”

_Origin of the Werepeople --- A heuristic analysis of the evolution of supernatural humans and their allies --- Review Copy --- Prof. Andrew Fhernst_

“You friend Mason, for example---”

“Fiancee, actually.”

“Irrelevant. Your friend Mason, I believe---”

“How is _Mason_ relevant?”

Mason had attended one of Corey’s lecture courses (for fun) and impressed the lecturer with such insightful questions that he’d been asked whether he wouldn’t prefer studying classics to chemistry. Even so, Corey couldn’t understand why they kept expecting him to match Mason’s intelligence.

The professor sighed, deeply. Corey tore his eyes away from the book and nervously wrung his hands together realizing that he had already scratched the skin off his left wrist. Shallow wounds healed fast though. He desperately began to watch the second hand of the professor's antique clock tick unbearably slowly towards the end of the mandated ten minutes of end-of-semester supervision.

“I'm---” Corey stopped the apology just in time. It did not usually receive a good response as his voice wasn't loud enough for apologies to sound anything other than pathetic. He smiled instead, because it was the one thing he knew he was good at. “This isn't the best I can do,” he lied, “and I will work harder next term.”

“Good. You said that last year,” the tutor tapped three fingers on the arm of his throne while Corey held his breath, “but assuming one failure definitely leads to the next is a fallacy.”

_Go. To. Hell._

The minute hand crept slowly over the twelve mark.

As soon as he was out of the office, the meeting dissolved from his mind and five weeks of freedom began to loom. The history department, with its pretence of modernity and aesthetic accents of antique mahogany, lost its mysterious corners and became a meaningless building.

He was just about to disappear when he heard his name called. He ignored it, hoping for a different Corey, but a girl appeared jogging from behind him, and immediately and directly met his eyes.

“Hm?” He smiled at her. She was one of the literature students taking Latin as an elective, but he'd never seen her outside of class before. Her name escaped him.

“Do you have a minute?”

 _No, I want to go home._ He gave her a tired look, trying to keep the title and author of the book he saw in his tutor's office in his mind. _Supernatural humans and their allies… Professor Andrew Fer-something._ It was lost. He would have to sneak back later.

“Corey?”

“Sure, what's up?” He kept walking and she matched his pace, although only then did he realize this was the long way around to exit the building. He would miss seeing his favourite painting as well, the three-headed, seven-eyed Siamese cat.

“Just a question…” the girl didn't match his cheery tone, “are you a chameleon, or a magician?”

The word _chameleon_ used to make him unreasonably anxious, but a year and a half of studying myths was enough to neutralize it. On the other hand, she was too serious to be asking for an abstract opinion.

“Umh?” He made a vague sound, pushing open a door and holding it for her. She didn't walk through it, giving him the choice to either stop walking or rudely slam the door in her face. It was unfair. He pushed it further into a wall and leaned against it to keep it from swinging back.

“This is important,” she said.

“Uh. I mean… what do you mean chameleon?”

“Look,” she stretched out a hand and a small ball bearing materialized above her palm. _Materialized._ Literally. It spun a firework of sparks around it, then settled on her hand, perfectly round and reflective. When he blinked to clear his vision, she let it fall to the floor with a carpet-muffled thud where it continued to roll towards his shoes. Corey took a step to avoid it and looked her in the eyes. There was not a hint of anything he could recognize as antagonism, but every other time anyone had approached him about superpowers it was to call him a monster or stab him with stationary.

“You're one of us?” he asked, carefully, shifting his feet to avoid the impossible marble and make it easier to break into a run. She beckoned to the marble, and the marble returned smoothly to her hand. And when she smiled, he realized with a touch of sympathy that this was the first time since they started university that he'd seen her smile.

“I'm a magician,” she explained, “but the important thing is which one are _you_?”

“Chameleon,” he whispered, feeling very certain that it was a mistake. He cleared his throat. “How did you know? And what's a magician?” Did she mean _druid_? But could druids move things with their mind so effortlessly?

She smiled again, the line of her mouth softer this time and nodded.

“Good.”

“Hang on though---”

“Others like me might come after you, Corey,” the girl spoke quietly, ignoring the footsteps of a student coming up behind her, “and the only way they won't kill you is if you can prove to them that you're not a magician.”

He let the door slip from his hand, the girl squeezing through at the last minute. Instinctively, he reached for his phone to call Mason, then remembered Mason was meeting his parents and would, on principle, ignore every phone call, unless he called three times which was code for emergency. This was not an emergency. This girl was crazy, he was almost certain, and he refused to believe that his life was ever going to go back to the nightmare that was Beacon Hills.

A student opened the door they were still standing next to and Corey watched him, already feeling a nostalgic, dreadful fear creep up his spine.

“Who even are you?” he asked the girl, as she stood there waiting for the hallway to clear.

He was used to living with the knowledge that an anti-supernatural private army had a vague idea of what he was, where he was, and who he loved, but Monroe had proven long ago that she wasn't interested in hunting him specifically. He was harmless. If the girl's warning was about hunters, she was only paranoid.

“A magician,” she said, unhelpfully. “I literally can't explain it, but just… be careful, OK?”

He shook his head as the hope for a false alarm grew stronger. The girl began to look impatient.

“I'll see you around,” she said, pushing the door open with the flat of her boot and disappearing behind it. Annoyed, Corey left the building visible, and continued to act like a normal human being for the remainder of his journey home.

As planned, he arrived exactly as the Hewitts were leaving. He didn’t dislike the Hewitts, but they made him tired and morose, so Mason always took care to organize their visiting schedule around Corey's timetable. Using a few brief, arranged, accidental meetings to dissuade suspicion and a total of three very believable emergencies, they had so far managed to keep up this streak for a year and a half.

“Ah, we almost missed you, Corey,” Mrs Hewitt lamented as she gave him a hug that somehow felt cold and calculating. He hugged her back and smiled at her, stiffly, quickly glancing at Mason to appraise how the lunch went and finding nothing out of the ordinary. Then Mason smiled, but his smile was fake and Corey immediately began to feel anxious.

He shook hands with Mr Hewitt, forgetting not to shake out his crushed fingers afterwards. Handshakes were something he practised specifically for impressing Mason's father, and at his current failure he realized that the girl from Latin had effectively convinced him of danger. He didn't have a choice whether to believe her or not. He was already reacting.

“I'm sorry,” he explained, half-heartedly, “I had a meeting. Good to see you, though.”

Mason ushered his parents off the porch and steered them towards the car quickly enough to avoid any more pleasantries while Corey retreated into the house, pushed all of the cushions to one end of the couch and collapsed, face-first, into the heap.

“What's a magician? Other than an awkward nerd in a top hat?”

Corey shook his head, rolling his eyes. He only ever allowed himself eye-rolls while drunk --- or as much as his body allowed him to feel drunk --- and it seemed like a good occasion to try and make himself more dizzy than the alcohol ever would. With every drink that did absolutely nothing, he missed the days when alcohol carried the risk of death and embarrassment. The bar was quiet. There would be no dancing.

“It's just another thing we don't know,” he said, “and I doubt Deaton and Argent know, or they would have mentioned it.”

“Not necessarily…” Mason was wearing his about-to-head-to-the-library look, so Corey downed the rest of his sloe gin for an excuse to go to the bar, just to make it more difficult while Mason continued musing, “do you think it's another name for a druid?”

“Does it matter? She was obviously wrong.” He stood, before Mason could begin to pack his things, and indicated the bar. To his disappointment, Mason shook his head.

“Be careful, yeah?”

Corey laughed beatifically at the concern and headed to the bar with a spring in his step, only to stop short five feet away. The girl from Latin was sitting on a barstool, her fingers tracing the rim of a wineglass. Despite the additional make-up and jewellery, Corey recognized her immediately by the haphazard French braid that crossed her head.

Glancing back at Mason, Corey found his phone and called him.

“She's here,” he whispered. Mason immediately hung up and as casually as he could, joined him at the bar. Corey nodded towards the self-proclaimed magician just as she turned her head and saw them. The corners of her mouth moved up up in what could not possibly be a smile.

“She looks less ominous than you described,” Mason muttered, elbowing him in return as Corey backed into his shoulder.

“I wasn't going for ominous.” Corey spoke quietly enough that the girl wouldn't overhear, but he wasn't certain that she didn't when she laughed dryly and caught his gaze. She slid off her stool and walked over, dragging her glass along the empty bench in front of her.

“Good to see you,” she said as soon as she was close enough, “I'm glad you're looking appropriately concerned.”

Corey gritted his teeth behind a smile.

“What are you doing here?”

“It's, uh, the college bar, Corey.”

“Of course it is,” Corey tactically admitted defeat, before Mason --- friendly and calculating --- introduced himself, full name and handshake.

“I hope we can trust you,” he added with a small laugh.

“Well, I don't know about that. I'm Caroline.” She glanced at Corey, “you didn't remember my name, did you? I just realized.” Corey bristled under the accusation. “Anyway, if you see anyone suspicious, let me know, OK? I'll take care of it.”

Corey watched Mason appraise her as they talked. Without ever meaning to, Mason had a habit of drawing people's attention away from anyone else, and it suited Corey well to be standing next to such a creature. It gave him time to breathe.

Before she re-joined her group of brightly dressed friends, Caroline handed them both a business card each. It was grey and official-looking, with an understated font that spelled out her name and a phone number. _Caroline Ennit._ _Literature._

“Neat,” Mason commented, already saving the credentials to his phone. Corey stared at the card with knitted eyebrows.

“What kind of a student carries around a bunch of business cards?” he asked, looking up at Mason to make sure the question was not taken rhetorically. Mason fished his wallet out of his jeans pocket and handed him a crisp white card.

“You'd be surprised.” He laughed lightly. The card had a pretty, printed black border. _Mason Hewitt_ , it read, above Mason's university e-mail address _,_ and a phone number that Corey did not recognize.

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah, I know.” Mason dropped his gaze, pretending to be embarrassed. “Blame my parents. I'm supposed to be looking for internships now, they said these might be useful.”

Corey shook his head, slipping both cards into his front shirt pocket. He felt tired, and it was Caroline's fault. He hoped that tomorrow the vague feeling of dread would be gone and he'd stand up for his right to not be consciously hunted.

“Lets just go home.”


	2. Monsters That Might Be People And People That Might Be Monsters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I literally only just remembered that you have to be 21 to purchase alcohol legally in the states? I guess I'm just going to ignore that fact, forgive me. Or assume everyone has a fake ID in the previous chapter.

Even before he was awake, Scott McCall's voice haunted him. It was difficult to forget that Scott had once clawed into his head and walked through his memories like it was nothing, so the fact that Scott always, always meant well just wouldn't stick. And yet, Scott had significantly lowered what the death count in Beacon Hills would have been, so it would be selfish not to appreciate his existence. Scott had saved his life more than once. Even so.

Corey opened his eyes and realized that the alpha was, in all his husky-voiced, good-natured glory, present downstairs.

At the start of the semester, out of paranoia more than necessity, Corey and Mason had spent two days arranging a way down to the ground out of every upstairs window, and practising the steps and handholds to get down safely. It was meant to be a way of escaping from hunters or other horrific monsters that wanted them dead, but in half a year it became just another way to leave the house. Corey showered, dressed, made himself invisible, then escaped through the window furthest from the sitting room, where he'd last heard Scott's voice.

He made it to his supervisor's office just after ten and waited five more minutes for the man to leave for his coffee break. The lock was easy to pick; Corey was in and out with the _Origin of the Werepeople_ before the professor had even ordered his beverage.

He made his way to the library through the quiet campus, staying invisible because he was still feeling a little paranoid. He hopped over the barrier with the card reader, then went to the top floor. The walls of the top floor of the building were glass, making the room unusually light and airy for a library, and there was a perimeter of a ledge between the end of the carpeted floor and the window that people were advised to avoid for safety reasons. This meant he could sit there all day without the risk of being tripped over or sat on. He settled himself comfortably with his back to the glass, and opened the book.

True to his expectations, it was written by someone who had seen werewolves, and by the gratuitous amounts of untranslated Latin, it was likely to be a druid. Corey quickly scanned the index for _magician, wizard_ and _druid_ and found only the last, with suspiciously little information. The author was attempting to expand upon the origin myths of each creature, which was common enough for these types of works, but unlike the others it wasn’t trying to find a common cause for all of them (there were a lot of books about some kind of supernatural field or aether or other new age nonsense that was supposed to manifest as magic, but there was never any evidence presented and most of the theories weren’t even logically consistent). This guy was actually doing research, not just making stuff up.

“Corey,” he heard, right before Mason's hand smacked him in the eye and he threw his arms out blindly to catch it.

“That was my eye, Mason.” Corey stopped squinting and looked up to see Mason crouched in front of him, not quite looking in the right direction to make eye contact.

“Ah, sorry. Good morning, I brought you coffee,” Mason said, trying to act casual as he seemingly talked to empty air.

“My god, Mason, I love you.”

Scott McCall was leaning on a bookshelf a few feet behind. As usual, Scott registered Corey's anxiety, then swiftly dismissed it with a little shake of the head.

Nothing ever changed. Corey smiled.

“Hey Scott.”

“Hey.”

When they got to Mason's car, he shifted to the visible plane.

“Here,” he said, handing Mason the _Origin of the Werepeople_ over the gear shift, “I stole this for you.”

“Oh you are sweet!” Mason took the book and skimmed the abstract. The book itself was purposefully old-looking: cloth bound with gilded edges. “Do you think…?”

“Look at the inscription.”

Mason flipped to the title page and found the handwritten line of text printed in italics above the author's signature. _LOOK AFTER THEM._

Air whistled through his teeth. Scott impatiently leaned over from the back of the car, holding onto the top of Corey's seat, which placed his right hand much too close to Corey's neck for comfort. Corey leaned back as subtly as he could.

“Can I have a look?” Scott asked. Mason passed him the book, thoughtfully lifting his thumb and index finger to his chin.

“Who do you think _them_ is?” Corey asked, to keep him talking.

“Supernaturals?” Mason suggested, “though it could just as well refer to objects.”

No more ideas were forthcoming, and Scott busied himself with scanning the opening paragraph of the book. Corey checked the time on his phone, realizing that Mason had called him twice while he was gone. He threw an apologetic look his way, but Mason only raised a hand and shook his head.

“Anyways,” Scott finally broke the silence, slamming the book shut loudly enough to make Mason flinch. “Theo and the girls can investigate this with you. I'm here about the magicians.”

“Theo?” Corey swallowed and inched his hand closer to Mason's before remembering that Mason had been the one to call Scott. He snatched his hand away just before Mason could take it and looked at him with accusation. “Why? Mason, why are _they_ here?”

“They're not here yet,” Scott countered. Mason's face betrayed not a hint of impatience. “Either way, Corey, I take threats against my pack very seriously. You should know this.”

Gently, Corey smiled. He let Mason take his hand.

“I should.”

To Mason, he whispered, “thanks.”

“ _Any_ ways,” Scott interrupted before they could even think about kissing, “Corey, who is Caroline?”

Corey shifted around to sit cross-legged facing the back seat. Scott did not look particularly worried, which made him feel a little bit safer. And now that he thought about it a bit more, Corey remembered knowing Caroline. It was the start of the first year of university: a young and optimistic post-doc tutor wanted people to get to know each other, so she split them up in groups of three and assigned a topic for each to research and present in however much Latin they could. Caroline had already been pretty much fluent in the language --- and now that he thought about it her being a druid would make a some sense --- and Corey was pretty much an expert on research by then so the assignment itself was pretty easy. He couldn't remember ever talking to her again, or the third person in the group.

“She's studying Literature,” he began to explain, “taking every single Latin course that’s available. She's been here since year one, so not a mysterious transfer or anything… maybe… she's like, fluent in Latin, but that's not _very_ unusual here. I think she must have taken it for an easy grade.”

There was something unbearably depressing about Scott being on campus and yet unable to pursue education because of a stupid gang of cowards from whom he felt obliged to protect the world. Corey wondered whether Scott felt regret at the decision. Corey definitely would.

He tried to come up with any more information he had on Caroline while Mason drove home, then Mason continued with his own impressions of the magician while Corey nodded along. It was a ten-minute drive that took just as long on foot, but Mason loved the way the landscape looked at seventy mph and Corey loved closed spaces.

“She has no reason to lie.”

With this point, Corey disagreed. “She's messing with us. Some people just like lying.”

“Can we contact her?” Scott asked, dubious about Corey's theory. Corey handed him one of the business cards she gave them, and it made Scott smile to look at the card. A career – another thing Scott couldn't have because of Monroe's hatred. “She sounds helpful, honestly.”

“There is no such thing as a _magician,”_ Corey reminded them, because they kept forgetting. Scott would be able to tell he was lying, but he didn't push it because if there's one thing that Scott had improved upon in the last year and a half, it was tact. Not a lot, but improvement had happened.

As determined as he was not to trust her, however, Corey couldn't not. She had created a steel marble out of thin air, casually, with no incantation or rune. Whatever she was, she was something more. Dangerous in the unique way that everyone in the pack was dangerous.

“Scott, how's the war going?” Corey asked, mostly to change the subject, but also because he had a vested interest in it ending. Last he heard, Scott was having some trouble getting the other packs to stop fighting for long enough to notice Monroe's army. It was hopeless and complicated. Scott frowned into the rear-view mirror, but it was a determined kind of frown. It meant bad news that the alpha was looking forward to confronting.

“Stiles got us a meeting with the Seattle pack, but they heard a rumour that one of our core is a Monroe assassin. Totally freaked them out.”

“Is it true?” Corey asked.

“No,” Scott said, smirking, “of course not. They're probably talking about Nolan.”

“Oh. How's he doing?”

“No direct contact, but he sent us three more defected hunters the past couple of months so I think he's doing well.”

Nolan had embarked on an evangelical journey to convert the younger generation of Monroe's recruits. They were the kind of people who had to fight something, so instead of discouraging them entirely, Nolan just gave them a different enemy. It was brave and stupid and idealistic and it was everything that no-one expected. But Nolan couldn't lie --- he wasn't a trained spy and he did not have superpowers. He wasn't likely to survive a gunshot wound. His only defence was Monroe's constant underestimation of Scott's pack as individuals.

“I worry about him,” Corey said quietly.

Scott had clearly briefed Mason about the war effort when he arrived in the morning, so Corey left it at that when they arrived at the house.

Theo was waiting, sitting cross-legged on the hood of the brightest lime-green car that Corey had the misfortune to lay his eyes on. Having fully embraced his insubordinate sociopathic tendencies, Theo had taken up a liking for aviator bomber jackets, collared shirts and unnecessarily fast cars that he crashed as often as it rained. He was trying very hard to demonstrate a lack of leadership skills, but the confidence with which he did it had the exact opposite effect.

Corey didn’t exactly like him, but he did enjoy having him around because he was, on most occasions, increasingly less evil and more likeable. And once he learned to see through his lies, Theo turned out to secretly be an actual complex, real human being.

“Morning, all,” Theo said, eyeroll at the ready.

“Hey, Theo,” Corey greeted him without much enthusiasm and headed straight for the door. Mason looked around for Liam but with a sigh remembered that only Theo and the girls had been invited. Liam was too busy training to be the next Scott McCall and he already visited them often enough to test Scott's brilliant good nature.

“Malia's driving so they should be here soon,” he heard Theo inform them, and suddenly the house was full of people and Corey could not help but smile. It was a shitty reason, but the threat was overestimated at best and a hoax at worst, and he was finished with essays for the term and if only the paranoia would leave then the next few weeks should only consist of kissing Mason under a thousand lights and just as many decibels of terrible electronica.

Scott and everyone else had gone to test drive Theo's horrific green monster on the interstate when the Harbinger of Death climbed out of Malia's lovely ancient Audi. She was looking even paler than usual and glared at Corey from under her neatly styled eyebrows before her face softened into a smile. Malia was still sitting in the car, eyes closed, breathing deeply.

“Someone get me some coffee, and a library card,” Lydia demanded, swinging her bags out of the back-seat. Having expected this, Corey reluctantly handed over his card, since he could always get into the building through the other plane and the thought of separating Mason from library access was heartbreaking. Lydia could probably just talk her way in anyway, but she looked a little too shaken by the road trip.

“Thanks,” she said, and she held onto his hand for a second, squinting into his face. Her fingers were cold, and Corey had to glance at her again to make sure she was not a skeleton.

After she let go, hanging one of her bags on his arm, she decided, “you're good, Corey.”

“Right.” For all his hopeful scepticism, the weight was still there to lift off his shoulders, “that's great, thank you.”

“For the next two weeks or so, obviously you're going to die one day.”

That felt entirely unnecessary, but she looked so tired he decided not to point it out.

“There's worse things than death,” Malia snapped, after finally getting out of the car and immediately forgetting about its existence. The Audi began to roll off the drive, first imperceptibly, then faster.

“For example, Malia's driving,” Lydia shot back, lifting an eyebrow when she saw the car move.

“I got us here, didn't I?”

Lydia secured the library card in the top pocket of her gently pink blazer, wisely deciding to let the argument go. Before following her into the house, Corey caught Malia's attention and nodded towards the car and she swore loudly enough to make the neighbour’s dogs bark.

 _This is going to be fun_ , Corey told himself, _so much fun._ And his blood ran cold at the thought.


	3. A Thankless Effort

“What is she doing?” Corey asked, looking out of the window as Malia circled the house yet again. Lydia looked up from _The Origin of the Werepeople,_ blinked at the real world and followed Corey’s gaze to the window.

“Checking the perimeter,” she said simply, “she’s nervous.”

“Of magicians?”

“Of a threat she can’t just track down and rip to shreds.”

“Ah.” Corey wasn’t about to judge people for their coping mechanisms, even if this particular one was trampling over the one flower bed that he and Mason actually maintained. He sighed and returned to the task of sorting through the piles of books on the shelves to decide which ones Lydia could keep and take back with her to MIT, and which ones he and Mason hadn’t finished reading yet.

“Look at this,” Lydia said, drawing his attention to _The Origin of the Werepeople_. He gently set down another stack of books in front of her, then looked at the page she was pointing at. It was one of the chapters on druids, this one detailing the known limits to their power. “It claims that invisibility has been sought after for centuries, but no-one has yet succeeded at anything even close to what you’re capable of.”

“Right, but I thought we already knew this?”

“We did,” she shut _The Origin of the Werepeople_ and began to look through the pile of books he’d just brought her, “but this just reminded me of it. See, druids, being people of magic who don’t always base their research on the scientific method, have a lot of beliefs that are wildly unfounded and untrue. For instance, that there exists a ritual with which one can steal another druid’s power.”

Corey slowly followed through her reasoning, trying to find gaps in it that would save him from being hunted by evil, misguided, power-hungry druids.

“But druids don’t carry power,” he remembered, “they draw power from… nature? The earth? Something. So you can’t _take_ a druid’s power. It would be like trying to steal…” he waved his hands vaguely, “the capacity for abstract thought... or something.”

“Yes, and that’s why no-one sane actually believes that theory! Oooh I like this one, where did you find it?” She was flicking through _Magical Humans_ _of_ _Estonia,_ _Mythical and Otherwise_ , a handwritten book so obscure that Corey had had to dig it out of a pile of newspaper clippings, from under the floorboards of a secret basement in a dead werewolf's underground villa.

“A secret basement in a dead werewolf’s underground villa.”

Corey still remembered a time when Mason would restlessly and cheerfully dissect everything about the supernatural, back when _supernatural_ only meant that the world was something more than it seemed. In senior year, Mason began constructing a network of supernatural-aware academics. Most of them were too involved with werewolf packs to share advice freely, but there were a few that admired Mason’s dedication to creating a reliable, widely accessible source of information and offered their help.

Slowly, over several months, that yearning for understanding had turned into an obsession, and then Mason was only tired. The supernatural was too closely tied to _death_ in their world. Corey, realizing this a little too late, held on to him, trying as hard as he could to keep him from disappearing. Mason only just barely managed to dig himself out of that ditch, and Corey lived in near constant fear that he would one day fall back in again.

The network was still active, however, and occasionally, a supernatural creature would die of old age, and their human relatives, wary of that world, would donate their belongings to a historical society or a museum, and with the help of Stiles, Lydia, and some unlawful breaking and entering on Corey’s part, a lot of books and journals inevitably wound up in their hands. Corey usually sneaked them back where they’d found them, but not without making a copy first.

Once he’d sorted through the books, he had nothing else left to do that was essential or productive so he made coffee, ordered lunch, then paced the corridor trying not to bother Lydia too much. He wondered whether Malia would mind if he joined her for a stalk through the neighbourhood but her nervous energy scared him a little, so he decided to continue pacing the corridor and worry quietly. Mostly about Mason being in a sports car with two practically unkillable people --- one of whom was a confirmed sociopath. _Scott wouldn’t let anything happen to Mason_ , he thought, trying to believe it.

When they returned, Mason was alive and happier than he'd been in days, or probably just high on adrenaline. Corey was already out on the driveway, having heard the engine from a mile away.

“Corey, you have to drive this thing,” Mason said, looking back at the car lovingly enough to make Corey jealous. The sun reflecting off the lime green paint was blinding and Corey shuddered inwardly, smiling at him with as much confidence as he could pretend to possess.

“I'm pretty sure my driving is an insult to the car industry.”

While Corey revelled in the relief that Mason was _alive_ and _happy,_ Mason laughed off what was definitely not meant to be a joke, then continued to earnestly describe the technological marvels that the modern automotive industry was capable of. Corey rather liked listening to the theory of it, or maybe he only liked the way Mason talked: with enough enthusiasm to make mechanical engineering sound comprehensible.

In the sitting room, surrounded by three laptops and a scattering of books, Lydia was still frowning skeptically at _Magical Humans_ _of_ _Estonia,_ _Mythical and Otherwise._

“There is no such thing as a _magician,_ ” Lydia declared as soon as she noticed they were present. They had all --- except Malia --- tiptoed around the door so as to not disturb her, but five people was a bit of a crowd.

Taking a seat on the couch, Corey nodded sagely. He was about to whisper _I told you so_ _,_ but Mason was quicker.

“Why?” he asked, “and what do you think Caroline Ennit is, then?”

Lydia rolled her eyes.

“A druid, obviously.” She sounded certain. “It's just a word.”

“If she's an ordinary druid why does she think there are people after _Corey_ in particular?” Mason asked. He squeezed Corey's hand for reassurance. “There must be more to it.”

When Mason said his name in the third person, Corey buried his head in Mason's shoulder, closing his eyes. It felt too presumptuous, too egotistic to take this much attention for a vague, unreal threat from a stranger. There were more actual things that the pack was currently fighting against. This was beyond silly. _Magicians!_

Lydia began to explain her theory to them, but he remained with his face in Mason's shoulder and pretended not to exist while he considered if he could defeat the fake magicians on his own --- if they existed at all. Caroline had mentioned that they wouldn't be a danger at all if Corey could convince them that he wasn't a magician. It seemed obvious that the first thing he should know was what a magician was, but even thinking about that word made him want to laugh.

Maybe being a chimera would be a little easier to prove. He supposed sequencing his DNA could do the trick; he could post the report onto his Facebook page and pin it.

“What a ridiculous threat this is,” he said as quietly as he could. Apparently not quietly enough, since he was in a room full of supernatural creatures.

“War will always find people like us,” he heard Theo say, “even when you do decide to sit it out.”

Corey felt Mason's pulse quicken from where he felt it through his wrist.

_I'm still not like you, Theo. We're not like you._

He felt like he'd been insulted but didn't want to assume.

“Right, that's it,” Scott said so suddenly that Corey opened his eyes to check what was happening. Scott had climbed out of his armchair, uncrossed his arms and taken out his phone with Caroline's business card stuck in the case. Theo was staring at Corey in his usual confrontational manner, which meant that he _had_ meant to be insulting, but Scott was expecting silence for the phone call so neither of them could speak.

Nobody was breathing as Scott waited with the phone to his ear, so the signal was clearly audible. When it stopped, Corey felt his throat close up. Everything was becoming real way too fast.

“Hello, could I speak to Caroline Ennit?” Scott asked, pleasantly. He was smiling, as if she could see him. Caroline's answer was too quiet to make out. “Awesome, this is Scott… a friend of Corey's. Yeah, McCall. You've heard of me, wow, okay… okay… Of course I'm concerned, this whole thing is very concerning.”

_A friend of Corey’s._ Corey seethed inwardly but kept his expression benign. There was a pause as Caroline talked. Scott began to pace.

“I see… Are you sure? Maybe we could talk in person sometime?” Scott laughed. “Of course I don't trust you!”

Theo sighed audibly, bringing attention to himself so that everyone could see him roll his eyes. Scott furrowed his brow at him. Malia, breathing air through her teeth, stomped out of the room by the kitchen door and slammed it behind her. For three seconds, silence reigned.

Scott pressed the phone to his chest and whispered in Corey's direction, “does _Three Heads_ _and Seven Eyes_ mean anything to you?”

“Uhm, I think… It's a painting.” Corey said, a shiver running down his spine, because with that,Caroline definitely knew way more about him than she should. “In the history department.” That building was full of paintings and the three-headed, seven-eyed Siamese cat was not even one of the popular ones. He felt Mason squeeze his hand in question and it reminded him that even Mason didn't know which history department painting was his favourite, and Mason knew everything.

When Scott resumed his chat, Corey turned to Mason and whispered an explanation.

“That is kinda worrying,” Mason said, then he smiled, “can I see that painting though?”

Corey would have been happy to tell Mason about the three headed cat, but it felt like a part of his soul and he didn’t want everyone else in the room seeing it and judging him for it. It was a little thing, but Caroline had managed to take it from him and Corey had to resist the urge to rip Scott's phone out of his hand to scream at her. He was rarely angry and it felt a shame to waste it.

“We'll be there,” Scott promised, and hung up only after Caroline did. He looked very pleased with himself when he announced the arranged meeting, and soon, they would know whether she was lying or just delusional.

The library was open twenty-four-seven, but it wasn't comfortable enough to sleep in, so Corey left Mason and Lydia to their studies at the early hour of eleven pm, and walked home on his own.

He looked up at the sky, but the lights of the city took away from the brightness of the full moon that he'd always had to squint against in Beacon Hills. He had become accustomed to seeing the sky this way, with only three or four visible stars, the emptiness between them not quite the right shade of black. Before he knew that werewolves were real, the significance of the moon was only abstract: it was an astonishingly unreachable object that made the world surreal during the day. With werewolves, it became another thing that made his life more difficult.

It was cold and he was tired, so when his foot caught on something that didn't belong on a road, he assumed immediately that it was a kerb. He looked back, seeing a smooth pavement and nothing around, save for a bartender smoking some distance away. Only then did he feel a rising panic that something was off, that it was not quiet enough and he could hear a car that had been idling a street away the whole time.

Something collided with his spine.

Before he fall forwards, he felt his jacket yanked back up and a hand pull on his shoulder, but he couldn’t allow the hand could close around his neck, because that meant _death_ , so he pushed back and dropped to the ground. Miraculously, it seemed to have worked, because as soon as he disappeared he was able to roll away and finally see what was happening.

His attacker looked like any one of Monroe's thugs; he wore a strange smile and looked not a bit shocked at not being able to see him. Most importantly, the guy did not look like a magician ought to look. Corey took a few careful steps backwards, trying not to breathe as much as he needed, and the thug began to circle the street. He was joined by another, a slender one in a mask and hood, more surreal and terrifying, and Corey was certain that they heard his heartbeat, and he was certain that they'd follow if he ran.

He continued to inch away from them, back towards the library, remembering that his phone was in a zipped pocket of his jacket and there was no way he could risk that right now. The noise of the idling car engine stopped, and nothing disturbed the silence except the quiet footsteps of the hunters, circling, and his own heart beating in his throat. Then a quiet click, the falling of a pin and clinking of metal on asphalt. A smoke grenade rolled across the street.

Corey ran before he even made up his mind. His footsteps echoed horrifically, but now he could reach his phone without worrying and speed-dial Mason. Except… the problem with Mason was that he was simultaneously reliable and breakable, and Corey could not bring himself to risk them both dying for this.

He took a sharp turn right into a park, and while looking back to make sure the hunters were far enough away he found his path blocked by a tree. He hit it with enough momentum to tear the skin off his hands, and by the time he gathered himself the two hunters were standing at the gate. Their torches were bright and made the night darker.

Corey froze, pressing his back into the offending tree. Judging by the smoke grenade, the hunters knew who he was, but they didn't try to talk. They hadn't called him by name as was their habit. If they did, he wasn't even sure if he had the words to convince them of anything.

The first thug was staring straight at him, Corey could feel the warm torch light on his face. The other was creeping up the path, listening.

Forty-three seconds he stood like this, and then the light was gone and he was blind for the moment it took the hunters to move on. With all his heart, he hoped they would not come back, and that he was safe and that he could see Mason again before his life became this, once more.

Crouched by the roots of the oak that had become his friend, he called Mason.

“I love you,” he whispered, “save me.”

Mason picked up.

“Corey?” Immediately, he sounded worried, but Corey was still uncertain how much he wanted to tell him. He thought hearing Mason's voice would make him feel better, but it only made him more afraid to die.

“Hi, Mason.”

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah. I think? I'll be at the library in five minutes.”

“Why... what the hell happened? Where are you? Yes, wait, tell me where you are and I'll come and find you.”

“No! Don’t do that, I'm okay, I'm close, it's okay,” he whispered, “I will be there soon.”

“What happened?” Mason repeated, and Corey could hear the scraping of chairs and slamming of books in the background of the call, then Lydia's voice sounding mildly concerned.

The thought of Mason being out and about in the dark of night with two scarily efficient hunters on the prowl was making Corey re-think the whole phone call. There was a whole list of people who he should have called instead, why was Mason still the only one he trusted with his life?

He should have stayed and fought them.

His instincts were all wrong.

One little threat and half the pack had come to the rescue.

He couldn't be trusted to fight his way out of anything.

Then he remembered Theo's matter-of-fact ' _even when you do decide to sit it out',_ when he spoke of the war, and he remembered everything terrible that he still couldn't come to terms with and the one thing that he had accepted: that unlike everyone else, he would only give his life for one person in the pack and that person was not his alpha. Neither would he expect his Alpha to risk his life in return.

“Corey?”

Corey ran his hand across the lawn of dewy grass, washing the remaining tree bark and blood off his palm. He kept expecting to get used to pain, but it wasn't happening, and the itch of accelerated healing only served to remind him what he'd been through to acquire it.

“I'll be there soon,” he said, “stay where you are. I love you.”

“I love you too, but---”

Corey hung up in case Mason did manage to find out where he was, wiped the dew off on his jeans and took off towards the library. He neither heard nor saw any hunters on the way.

“This is my favourite knife.”

Two hours later, back at the house, after a rather anxious dinner and after everyone else had gone to sleep, Theo was holding out a switch-blade that Corey desperately did not want to take. Not just because Scott was silently judging the conversation over the stack of pizza boxes on the table. Scott wasn't exactly the perfect definition of pacifist. The fact was that Corey knew how easy it would be to take the role of an assassin and he did not want Theo or Argent or anyone else to get any ideas; breaking into Monroe's vault half a year ago, a pretty much entirely disastrous trip that left him with nightmares for a week, had been bad enough.

“No,” he said. Theo grinned wider.

“I'll teach you to use it.”

“No!”

“But it's so lovely, look it suits you.”

“Theo.”

“Otherwise we're just going to have to babysit you twenty-four-seven.”

“You don't have to,” Corey protested, horrified at the thought. “I'm probably safer on my own, anyway --- none of y'all can turn invisible, _I can_.”

“That's what we love about you,” Theo said, rolling his eyes, “but one day you're gonna want to do more than just hide and wait for the danger to go away.”

Corey stared at him incredulously in the silence that followed. Not that Theo didn't say these kinds of things often --- he lamented Corey's reluctance almost every time they met --- but compared to this, all the other times were either jokes or blatant attempts at manipulation. Said with a smirk, and only a sliver of truth. This was different.

“I don't want to kill them,” he said quietly, “I don't want anyone to die because of me, and I don't care if they're terrible people, they don't deserve to die.”

Theo made a sound of disgust, turning his face away. Scott was quietly watching them both. Corey scraped his chair back loudly and moved to leave the room but just before he slammed the door, Theo yelled after him.

“You're not the type to die for a stranger's sake so stop with the fucking pretense!”

He kicked the door shut and felt tears start to gather in his eyes not because what Theo had said was true, but because it meant that he'd been misunderstood and that was even worse. It had been a long day and he wanted it to be over.

On the way up the stairs, he saw Malia coming down to shout at them for waking her, and before he could pass, she barred his way and he found himself looking in her eyes, ice blue and furious. For once, he did not feel terrified of her.

“I've killed people before,” she said, “and I don't recommend it.”

She left before he could say anything, though he wanted to say _thank you_ and couldn't figure out how.


	4. If This War Destroys You Then We've Lost

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I finally figured out a summary, yay.

The meeting was planned for one in the afternoon, but the pack were already at the history department at ten in the morning. Scott was itching to get the whole thing over and done with so he could leave, having received a few worrying phone calls from Liam in California, and Corey had half a mind to tell him to just go. Caroline was expecting True Alpha Scott McCall, though, so she would have to meet True Alpha Scott McCall.

Mason stared at the three-headed, seven-eyed Siamese cat for a long time, his brow furrowed, a thumb and index finger resting on his chin. There was a painted mirror in the corner of the frame that brought the total of eyes up to nine, a lovely square number, but the reflected cat had sharper edges and an extra row of teeth. Noticing this, Mason shuddered.

“Why do you like this?”

“I don't know,” Corey admitted, with a smile watching Mason appraise the painting, “I try not to think about it.”

It was located on the first floor, in a corner between the entrance to the west stairwell and a small, seldom used lecture room. Someone had cleverly placed it behind a tall palm to hide most of the horror. The frame was made of unadorned dark wood, the background behind the cat was too cluttered to make it visibly striking, and the signature belonged to no-one famous. And yet, when Corey looked at it he felt some emotion he could not identify, and it became more and more abstract the more he tried to chase for an explanation. He didn’t even really like it, he was just drawn to it.

“It’s intensely horrifying,” Mason said, having given up on trying to find something positive about the work. Corey couldn’t disagree. No-one else commented on the painting itself, which made Corey feel like a complete weirdo, but they began to glance at him nervously so he mumbled some words that hopefully sounded like an excuse and left the corridor through the door to the west stairwell. He could hear Mason start to follow so he quickly disappeared into his surroundings, ran down the stairs and exited the building into the late morning sunlight. It might make him seem even weirder, but knowing his track record they would all forget about his existence as soon as he was out of sight anyway.

Students walked past him, leading their lovely normal lives, and he wished, again, to be one of them. He’d been lonely, before the pack, but at least he hadn’t been silently ridiculed for the mess that his mind had become. At least his soul had still been intact, not left dead and rotting by a magical tree stump.

He felt someone take his hand, and knew immediately that it was Mason but he kept his eyes averted.

“Corey?”

Before the pack, Mason hadn’t even known him. And a world without him was unthinkable, no matter how much uncertainty and pain he had to go through.

“I’m fine,” Corey told him, hoping they could just be for a while, silently, “don’t worry.”

Mason wasn’t fooled.

“Fuck that, talk to me,” he said. Corey smiled. He watched a group of students set out a picnic blanket, surrounding themselves with piles of textbooks, coffee cups and friendship. Corey had all of those things, he wasn't exactly jealous of them, but he also had memories of suffering for his right to exist so he couldn’t have that lightness and freedom, no matter how much he tried to pretend.

“Every time they’re here they remind me that this is never going to end. And I can’t believe how much you swear these days,” he said, “and I don’t know if that’s normal, or if it’s the war. We’re not even on the front line and look what it’s made of us.” Then he added softly, “Mason, what if I’m still dead?”

Mason went still for three seconds, then he pulled Corey’s hand towards him and held it close to his heart.

“You’re not dead,” he whispered eventually. Corey waited patiently for an explanation and was rewarded with the worst thing that Mason had ever said out loud. “The fact that Theo had literally brought people back to life? It’s insane. So one day I just... asked him about it. He gave me the Dread Doctors’ research, explained the theory and I spent a whole year teaching myself medical science.”

Corey began to feel a nauseating regret at having asked. He loved Mason’s incessant curiosity, but he didn’t think that Mason would ever go so far as to research something so incredibly morbid, and so close to home. He would have known that it would horrify Corey, or he wouldn’t have kept it a secret.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

Mason grimaced, “I didn’t want you to think exactly what you’re thinking now: that I was just double checking that my boyfriend wasn’t a corpse.”

“It does sound like that’s exactly what you were doing.”

“I know, so you’re just going to have to trust me. Okay then... to start with, there’s a side effect of your supernatural healing that keeps hold of your neural patterns even after what would otherwise have been brain death. It’s a kind of… ghost state. So when Theo resurrected you, everything that made you, like, _yourself_ , was just uh, switched back on, sort of. A lot of your cells would have been dead, but the way you heal, those would all have been replaced in minutes, and the magic would make sure that the cells were yours… the theory is more complicated, of course, but that’s the simplified version. So you’re not dead, not by any definition. And neither is Hayden, and neither were Josh and Tracy when Theo murdered them.”

Corey pressed his hands to his eyes. In the darkness, he repeated to himself what Mason had said. _You’re not dead. You’re not dead. You’re not dead._ The rest of it didn’t make any sense, and he didn’t feel any better about it yet, but he did recognise that something had changed; a subtle shift in the way he viewed himself. Like possibly, one day, he could call himself human. Or one day, his life wouldn’t feel so borrowed, and his skin would belong to him. He sat down on the grass and hugged his knees, trying to figure out if he was upset with Mason, or just the regular kind of shocked.

“Did you tell Hayden?”

Mason hesitated before replying.

“I did.”

“That’s good. It might have been bothering her too…”

“I think it was, but she wouldn’t have told anyone. Not sure she trusts me either, apparently I might have just said it to make her feel better ‘cause I’m so awfully kind.” Mason sounded miserable, and Corey realised that he _wasn’t_ upset with Mason. Mason had been coping with what the doctors did to him --- to them all --- by trying to understand it instead of trying to forget. There was an honesty in this that everyone else lacked.

“You _are_ awfully kind,” Corey nudged him with a shoulder, “I did try talking to Hayden, once, but I didn’t get far. She refuses to speak about it and I don’t blame her. I think she’s trying to forget… Hm… So... you taught yourself medical science? Just… as a side project? Dear god.”

“Not all of medical science,” Mason said, suddenly defensive for some reason. “Just the relevant bits, and well, a lot of genetics too and some classical field theory, that was very useful when I got to uni too, actually. Also, the Dread Doctors had developed this very impressive system for handling what is literally _magic_ in the context of human biology, so that was pretty interesting just by itself. And---”

“Mason,” Corey could listen to Mason talk about the hydrogen bonds of the water molecule for hours, but he drew the line at evil human experimentation.

“Yeah, sorry. I’d still marry you, you know,” Mason said.

“Still?”

“If you were dead.”

Laughing, because his life was absurd, Corey pulled Mason into the invisible plane and kissed him and they lay on the grass for a while, staring into the sun.

The rest of the pack found them in time, to gather them all for lunch and give them a chance to argue about their approach to interrogating Caroline. Theo was adamant that Scott was going to screw up, and Scott was arguing against that by telling Theo about the importance of being polite and friendly. Lydia suggested they both shut up and let her talk because every other idea was either creepy or idiotic. Corey was on Lydia’s side and trying to make the case that his opinion was slightly more informed because he was the only one who actually knew Caroline, and suggested further that she and Mason should be the ones steering the conversation. Scott was only there to look famous and important, and Theo and Malia were both terrifying each in their own way, therefore not helpful in civil discourse. Corey himself preferred to harmlessly observe from the sidelines. Which left Lydia and Mason, the smartest people in the room.

Before they could get anywhere near a sensible strategy however, Corey's phone rang, and he felt his hopes for the meeting drain away when he saw Caroline's number on the screen. He accepted the call, gesturing wildly at everyone to be quiet, but through the receiver he heard only a few muffled thuds and a sudden, short, horrifying scream. It was cut off by a sobbing cry.

Corey dropped his phone in shock, then immediately retrieved it from the floor and called her back. Everyone else was still, frozen in whatever action they had begun. Caroline's phone rang twice, then someone picked up; a definitely male voice.

“Hello?”

“Caroline?”

“Um, no? Who is this?”

“It's...” Corey paused, checked the phone screen to make sure he had the right number, then wondered whether he had imagined the screaming.

“Hello?” The voice sounded confused, “did you say Caroline? I don't think I know a Caroline, you must have the wrong number.”

Corey made an uncertain sound, then asked, “where is she?”

“I have no idea who you're talking about,” the voice said, sounding exasperated. Corey felt the phone snatched out of his hand and instinctively grabbed for it, but Theo caught his wrist and pushed him away, the phone to his ear. He let him have it, backing away into Mason.

“Hello there,” Theo said, a vicious streak to his voice that came hand-in-hand with the friendly words, “this whole elaborate shitshow you’ve put together is really quite something --- and while I, too, love a good game of _let's pretend the victim doesn't exist_ , you are wasting your exceptional talent here---” a pause. At the reply, Theo's face lit up, teeth showing, eyes bright. He laughed. “Oh, I’m going to kill you.”

It was a Saturday, the college admin offices were empty. The interior doors were locked, but not alarmed, and the outside doors were never shut because the building was connected to the ever-open library by a series of corridors with non-alarmed doors. It was a major security risk that no-one seemed to have noticed yet. Once they were in front of the office doors, Corey let go of Mason's hand to concentrate on lock-picking and Mason looked around uncertainly.

“This feels morally ambiguous,” he commented. Corey made a quiet sound of agreement, but he didn't really feel like delving into that subject right now. He pressed on the wrench another fraction, jiggled the pick and felt the pin set, then moved onto the next. Mason, apparently satisfied that no-one was watching the crime, moved onto observing the lock-picking. Corey was trying to concentrate on the pins, but Caroline had been right and there were people who wanted him dead for some mysterious, nonsensical reason. Not even a normal reason, like the fact that he could effortlessly break into secure buildings.

“You gotta teach me this some day,” Mason whispered when the lock finally gave and Corey swivelled the wrench around to open it. _Caroline might be dead already._ If she died for trying to warn him, Corey would be almost directly responsible for her death.

“I thought it was morally ambiguous?” he smiled gently. Speaking made it easier to breathe, at least. _Caroline Ennit might already be dead._ He didn’t even really know her.

“Only when stealing someone's personal information.”

“But we're trying to save her life, I'm sure she won't mind.” _She might already be dead._

“Hence the ambiguity.”

Corey held the door open for Mason, closed it behind them and turned the lock. The blinds were shut, but some daylight still got through, and the dust motes and abandoned mugs and cups still half-filled with water made the space look ancient somehow. As if humanity had perished years ago and this was a perfectly preserved museum diorama.

They found a username and password jotted down in one of the admin's notebooks and from there, accessing Caroline's term-time address was frighteningly easy.

She lived with three other girls, all cheerful-looking and brightly dressed. Judging by the state of the house they were preparing for a party, but seeing half the pack on their doorstep, with the rest in an alarmingly expensive car, they began to panic fast.

“Her car is here,” one of them said, “she takes it everywhere, she wouldn't have willingly left without it.” She pointed through the bay windows at a black sedan haphazardly parked on a kerb.

Lydia was looking at the sitting room doubtfully, shaking her head. A string of bunting was hanging loose above the TV, interrupted. One of the walls had a fist-shaped indentation in it, just above a picture frame with a photograph of Caroline at Disneyworld, hugging a boy that looked similar enough to be her brother.

“No-body has died here for at least seventy-three years,” Lydia said. Caroline's housemates stared at her.

“What the fuck is wrong with you,” one said, voice shaking with equal parts anger and disgust, “this is serious.”

Lydia ignored her, rolling her eyes, but quietly removed herself from the house. From the exchange, they surmised that the housemates probably did not know of Caroline's magical abilities, so they wouldn't be helpful in that regard. One of the girls began to cry, leaving the room quickly enough that they could pretend that she was fine. Scott began to panic, though subtly.

“We're going to find her,” he said, making it sound like a promise.

“Who are you again?”

“Friends,” Scott explained vaguely, “she was trying to help us with something.”

“What kind of something?”

Corey felt Mason take his hand and draw him away from the room, so he followed. Once they were outside, Mason turned him around and searched his face for something, but Corey couldn't figure out what. He looked calm, but concerned.

“What?” Corey asked, finally, but he felt a tear roll down his cheek and understood. He wiped it away quickly, then dabbed the rest of his face with the sleeve of his jacket. “I'm fine, Mason.”

“She's going to be alright,” Mason said, “she's a druid, isn't she? Or magician or whatever. Druids are powerful. Like, scary powerful.”

“Yeah.” Corey had doubts. Caroline had said, _I literally can't explain it_ , and this was why, and agreeing to talk to Scott, and trying to help him, despite the danger, despite the fact that she shouldn't have. “We asked too much of her,” he explained to Mason.

Mason didn't say anything, only gently pulled him into his arms and Corey felt safe at the same time that he did not deserve to feel safe.

The werepeople followed Caroline's scent until they hit the interstate, then it became too faint at a roundabout and they ended up in anxious silence, in Theo's green monster, sitting on the hard shoulder with the hazard lights blinking. The road was quiet. Corey gritted his teeth until it hurt. Mason wasn't with them, he was back at the house with Lydia, encouraging her to be psychic and Corey didn't really know _where_ he should be.

It had been three hours since the phone call.

“We'll find her,” Scott said, staring out at the landscape of freshly green-leafed trees. Daffodils bloomed on either side of the road. A gentle breeze ruffled through them, then the open window, and Corey saw the three other occupants of the car sit up suddenly, then exchange looks.

“Let's go,” Malia said with urgency. Theo was already slamming the handbrake down.


	5. At This Rate Fate Might Never Catch Up With You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got so confused with which side the driver's side was in american cars, so if none of this makes sense then I apologise. Also timelines? I don't remember when things were actually supposed to have happened in the show and you should probably ignore all mentions of time in this chapter.

Corey did not remember when he'd closed his eyes, but the next thing he knew was darkness and the smell of smoke was irritating his throat. He tried to cough to clear it, but he only succeeded in getting blood into his mouth. It was vile.

He opened his eyes, and the first thing he noted was that the interior of the car was covered in glass.

The first thing he heard was Theo kicking down the driver's side door, or at least trying to.

“Theo, you fucking dumbass,” Scott was saying, opening his own door without much trouble. On the driver's side, another car idled with its bonnet twisted up and blocking the view any further. Smoke escaped through the mountainous gaps at the edges.

“No-one's dead,” Theo replied, kicking his own door again, “are they? Malia? Corey?”

A sudden silence fell when the other car engine stopped. Corey looked at Malia, who was unhappily picking glass out of her hair and flicking it in Theo's direction. He was about to say something to agree, but his gaze snagged on his left knee, mangled and bloody, the metal and plastic of the car door folded around his ankle.

“Oh. Oh no.”

The pain he should have already been feeling a minute ago began to pick at his concentration.

“Ahhh, fuck it.” Theo finally gave up on his door and clambered over to the passenger's side to get out.

“Hang on,” Malia said, casting one worried glance at Corey and leaving the car to get to the other side. Corey saw Scott out of the window, attempting to get to the occupants of the car that had crashed into them, and beyond it all, he heard a voice that sounded familiar.

“We're fine!” Caroline yelled. “What the hell were you _doing_? What the… holy shit, that's Scott McCall.”

Corey assumed he was already delirious. The pain in his leg was becoming more and more intense and he did not understand anything that was going on. His vision blurred, he could feel the seatbelt digging into his neck, and he couldn't feel his left arm at all. He was too scared to look. Everyone else had already left the car, but he couldn't even think about moving.

“How do you know me?” Scott asked, a note of amusement in his voice.

“Scott,” Corey said quietly, hoping that Scott was listening, “that's Caroline.”

Theo looked up from inspecting the damage to the monster, and from his face Corey could tell that Theo was already figuring it out. Whatever was happening, Theo was bound to figure it out. And if not him, then Mason, and Mason was still safe and everything would be _fine_.

“This was not how it was supposed to go…” Caroline snapped, “but I guess we’ll have to make do.”

Corey found his phone, thankfully undamaged in his right hand side pocket, and called Mason, because if this was some weird evil plot and they were all going to die soon he needed to hear his voice.

“What's up?”

“We found Caroline,” Corey said, though his throat turned out to be too caked in blood for his voice to be discernible above a whisper. He spat the blood out and took a few deep breaths. The seatbelt was still digging into his neck so with the phone between his ear and his shoulder, he carefully unclasped it, noticing with some gratitude than none of his ribs felt broken. “Actually, Theo ran into Caroline.”

“That's good news, though, why do you sound weird?”

Corey laughed.

“Well, um, that's probably because,” he said, glancing at his leg again to make sure he hadn't imagined it, “I think I can actually see my, what was it? The tibia, probably, but it's fine, it's not like this sort of thing hasn't happened before.”

“You what? Wait, wait, wait.” A pause. Corey wanted to laugh again, but he felt like crying instead. “What do you mean you can _see it,_ what the fuck happened? Oh god. Theo crashed the car didn't he? Of course he did. Hang on, I'll pick you up, just tell me where you are.”

“I think… from what I can tell --- and I think I missed most of it --- what happened was that Theo pulled out onto the interstate and forgot to check his mirrors, or his blind spot or whatever, then some car crashed into us and Caroline… just happened to be in it. Everyone seems OK. Well, not dead. My leg's broken, obviously, and it's stuck in the door.”

“Shit… Is the _car_ dead?”

Corey looked out at the car, but since he couldn't really tell all that much from where he was, he looked at the people instead. Caroline was currently yelling at Scott for some reason, Theo was asking sensible questions that went unanswered, and Malia was trying to push the other vehicle away to get access to Corey’s side of the car. A car-mirror was swinging back and forth across the door it was still partially attached to. All of those things did not bode well for any of the vehicles.

Deciding that this had gone on for far too long, Corey shifted his left elbow to wrench it out from the dented door, and with relief found his arm to be unbroken and mostly useable. Now all he had to do was extract his ankle from the twisted car door, then set his shin well enough that it would start healing.

It would hurt. Probably more than it was hurting now. He decided to leave it for later.

“I don't know,” he told Mason. Caroline's car had taken the brunt of the damage to its engine which was probably bad, but the green monster was hit on the side. “Someone should call the police to shut this road down…”

“Lydia’s already speaking to them, but you need to tell us where you are.”

“Hey, Bryant,” someone called from the right. It was an unfamiliar voice, but when Corey turned his head he saw a familiar face. He'd seen it twice before: on a photograph at Caroline's house, and on one of the hunters from last night. He immediately remembered the other one, the smaller one that moved like a woman, wearing a mask…

“It was you,” he whispered, “both of you.”

“Corey?” Mason’s voice was full of concern.

“It's Caroline,” he said quickly, “I think she's a hunter… shit, I hope this makes some kind of sense to you. Get somewhere safe.”

“No, no, shhh,” the hunter whispered, and Corey noted with some discomfort that he was staring into the barrel of a small, albeit real, handgun, “tell him it's OK.”

“Corey!”

He tore his eyes away from the darkness and glanced again out of the window. There was no-one there, and beside Mason's confused questions he could hear nothing. Theo, Malia, and Scott, all gone. It made no sense, but this was how the McCall pack perished --- one druid and her brother. That's all it took. Some vague threats to use him as bait, and they all fell for it.

“Tell him to wait at home, with the banshee,” the hunter requested, “I promise I don't hurt humans.”

Corey shook his head. He closed his eyes. He had never really felt like he belonged in the pack, he though with some amount of regret, and now it was over, finally, but not the correct kind of over. If those three were gone, it meant they would all die soon.

“Mason, they're gone,” he said, hearing his voice turn into a whimper, “I love you so please go... take Lydia and get somewhere safe. Unknown.”

He used the word _love_ too often in mortal danger, and he wished he had said it more often when he wasn't about to die. Hearing the gun click, he instinctively turned invisible and ducked down into the back seat, hissing in pain when his leg shifted and his bones scraped together. The gunshot was loud, joined a moment later by the ricochet off the hunters' car.

Scott McCall was dead… it made no sense.

“Dude, what the hell?” He heard Caroline yelling, again, but when he looked up he saw that she was yelling at the guy with the gun, who was smiling distractedly, unwillingly. The same smile from last night, and so, so different to Caroline's, so much more _genuine_.

There was no-one else in sight, because they were all dead. Caroline stepped into view, her gaze searching and annoyed. There was blood on her mouth that she'd smeared across her chin, but apart from that she looked alive.

“I said don't kill them yet,” she said, then began to speak Latin, some silly children's rhyme that became the only thing that Corey could concentrate on.

He stared at the whitewashed ceiling until his eyes hurt, then he kept staring. A spider was crawling in and out of a vent, spinning a web across the gaps. He could hear footsteps through it, pacing from the right corner to the left, across the whole space, and he imagined hopefully that it was Caroline, racked with guilt at realizing that the creatures she hunted were only ever people.

He had waited so long for Monroe to realize this, it had become something he really believed in --- that one day, Monroe would wake up sane and begin dismantling the structure of war she had spent the years building. Then, finally, they would all be free. He never told anyone, not even Mason, but he hoped. It was silly, but so was all hope.

And then he’d met her and she almost killed him, looking perfectly remorseless and the hope had not returned since. The war was endless.

Malia was awake soon, violently, waking from a nightmare. Seemingly accustomed to both nightmares and being locked in a basement, however, she calmed down quickly enough.

“Where are we?” she asked, noticing that Corey was also awake. She shook Scott's shoulder but he remained unconscious. The Ennits had been generous with the wolfsbane and the magic and whatever else they had used to knock them out. Theo was slumbering in the opposite corner.

“I'm not sure,” he replied slowly. He couldn't remember the journey, only waking up and noticing the whiteness of the ceiling, with six point lights arranged symmetrically in a central circle. The room was probably a basement, judging by the lack of windows and the pacing footsteps above.

“What happened to you?” She nodded to his leg, which was still grotesquely broken. The blood had mostly dried, and the bones were already starting to grow together all wrong. He'd have to break it again to set it, but he couldn't bring himself to do it.

“It's from the accident. Could you… possibly, just like… hmm… or maybe not.” He didn't want Malia helping him either, but it really couldn't wait much longer. He wished Mason was there, then he was glad that Mason _wasn't_ there because at least he was safe. He hoped Mason was safe.

“Sure,” Malia agreed helpfully, probably misinterpreting his anxiety, “I've done this before.”

“Are you lying to make me feel better?” Silence answered him. He smiled. “That's very kind of you.”

“I have _seen_ it done before.”

“No, actually it's all right, I can do it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Despite the fact that he'd been trying to gather up the courage to break his knee into place for the past half hour and failed, it was starting to feel like something of a test for him. Every single time he faced something horrifying it was a test, a test that he failed more often than not. He remembered the times he didn't, the unpleasant rush of adrenaline when throwing himself at something that would definitely hurt and likely kill him. Every single time, he had managed not to die only to wish he was dead when the pain turned out to be too much to bear.

Corey took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Two seconds later, he opened them to a sudden, blinding pain in his leg and the sound of breaking bone.

“Dude, calm down,” Malia said, too close and smiling in what she probably thought was a comforting way, and he scrambled back away from her. He'd screamed, but mostly in surprise.

“Ngh…gah,” he gasped, “why.”

But his shin was growing together fine, and he'd be able to walk soon and that was going to be better than waiting. He was grateful, but also felt a kind of betrayal.

“What the fuck is going on?” Theo was awake, groggily picking himself up and shaking off the wolfsbane headache.

“I was helping!” Malia said, defensively, and Corey didn't comment because he wasn't sure how he felt.

“Good for you.” Theo half-heartedly kicked Scott's foot, but Scott only stirred a little and continued sleeping. “Where the hell are we?”

“Caroline and her brother took us,” Corey said, “so I assume we're some place of theirs.”

“An interesting friend you’ve made there.” As he spoke, Theo inspected the ceiling, then the reinforced door on the left, then he noted the camera hidden behind the glare of lights.

“They attacked me yesterday, and could kill us all any minute,” Corey reminded him (he had very strict definitions of friendship). “I wouldn't call her a friend.”

“I could kill you too and I'm a friend.”

“That’s debatable.”

“Hurtful, Corey! Anyway, I need your jacket.”

Corey stared at him in confusion. The sudden change in topic wasn't very much like Theo, which was how he could tell he was nervous.

“Are you cold?”

“No, I'm not cold,” Theo rolled his eyes, “remember that knife I tried to give you, because, by the way, I _a_ _m_ a wonderful friend? The one that you so rudely refused?”

Corey narrowed his eyes suspiciously and removed his jacket. There was a lump in the lining, behind the top right pocket that he never used, big enough to hide a small, neat, stiletto switch-blade. He rested his head on the wall behind and closed his eyes and wished that Theo didn't exist so that the world would be a much, much easier place to live in.

“God. Theo, you’re such a… a…” Corey waved his hands, exasperated.

“I think you mean to say _thanks_?”

“No, I think he meant to say dickhead,” Malia said, helpfully, then went back to trying to wake up Scott by poking him in the face. Corey inclined his head in her direction to agree, but then she ruined it by adding, “it might help, though.”

To his surprise, Theo picked through the stitches of his jacket carefully, gently, so as to not ruin the fabric, completely unnecessarily because it was already splattered with blood. Watching him, Corey remembered how that very morning, Theo had handed him the jacket just before they left the house, and sure enough, that bizarre, motherly gesture turned out to have a nefarious purpose behind it.

“What do _you_ need a knife for, anyway?”

“I don't --- you do.”

Corey tried to imagine himself stabbing a human being and could not. And stabbing Caroline? When he’d seen the rarity of her smile and the way her friends cried when they found out she was in danger? He remembered her arms wrapped around her brother at Disneyworld and the amusement in the guy’s eyes when he shot at Corey. The the torch in his face after a smoke grenade pin dropped, and now the footsteps above that paced and paced in anxious circles.

“You don't have to kill anyone,” Theo said, his face softening a fraction. “Humans are fragile, but not _that_ fragile.”

At the hospital, three years ago, Theo had kneeled over a teenager, taking his pain to ease the death, and a year before that, Theo had murdered Tracy and Josh in the same way. He would have killed Corey, had he been around.

The Ennits probably planned to kill all of them, or hand them over to Monroe which was the same thing. And how did that make them different from Theo, who fed them all to evil scientists, then got a second chance only because Liam chose to spare his life?

“Fine,” Corey said, hoping that he’d be able to make the same decision that Liam did but feeling a bit doubtful about it. He brought his knees up to his chest then shifted some of his weight onto the left. It hurt, but not impossibly. Using the wall for support, he stood and reached out a hand.

Theo tossed the knife towards him, along with the jacket.

“If you do end up stabbing someone, remember not to leave the knife in. They'll use it against you.”

“But won't they bleed out quicker?”

Theo looked to the heavens impatiently. “The important thing is that they don't stab you back.”

“I can survive a stab wound.” Corey didn't much like the idea of being stabbed at all, but he felt like arguing. There wasn't much else to do to make himself less nervous.

“You can't survive ten.”

“They're not going to stab me ten times while they're bleeding to death.” Talking about it made it seem abstract, somehow. The faith that Corey had in Scott, Malia and Theo made this whole situation temporary and trivial --- they were still alive, and so they would live. He wouldn’t have to resort to stabbing people.

Theo looked him in the eyes then, so frightfully that it made Corey want to disappear. He reached out for an object to blend into before realizing that was a weird and slightly embarrassing habit.

“They'll carve your brains out of your skull with a fucking teaspoon if it helps them survive.”

Thankfully, Scott chose that moment to wake.

“Finally!” Malia said, kicking Scott's foot to make him get up quicker, “I thought I'd have to go all prince charming on you.”

“You still can,” Scott said with a genial smile, kissing Malia as she continued to hover over him, then, at Theo’s rather annoyed little cough, picked himself up using her shoulders for leverage and looked around at the basement. He noticed the camera, the door, and the lack of windows. He looked at each of them, standing around expectantly.

“Have we been kidnapped?”

“It was Caroline and her brother,” Corey said with a sigh, “I think they're hunters.”

“Monroe?” Scott asked, trying the door and failing to do it any harm. He still looked a bit drowsy from the wolfsbane.

“I heard them mention the name, up there.” Malia nodded towards the ceiling, “they're waiting for her.”

“So… the magicians...”

“An elaborate lie to get us all here,” Theo reasoned.

“Well then, let's make them nervous, shall we?” Scott grinned and looked up at the ceiling. He took a few steps to run up then launched himself at the camera, ripping it out of the plaster with ease. “CAROLINE!”

Corey nearly jumped out of his skin at the shout. He splayed his fingers on the wall and disappeared into the whiteness of it, taking a few steps sideways. Theo took his place beside the hinges, Malia by the handle, ready to flank whoever came through the door.

Their answer was a thud on the ceiling. Scott smiled, mangling the broken device in his hands until it was only a pile of plastic and metal, then letting it scatter on the floor.

“WE CAN TALK THIS THROUGH!” he shouted again, then paused and, “YES, I CAN HEAR YOU!”


	6. Don't Presume That I Aspire To Destiny

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Probably my least favourite chapter I've ever written!  
> The next one has a bit of blood and violence in it so I set the rating to M, just in case. Also the whole story is a bit sweary so I think this is for the best.
> 
> Take care!

“Could you not have explained the plan first,” Corey hissed at Scott, but Scott just smiled quickly in his general direction.

“Don’t worry, we’ve got this,” he said, reassuringly. Theo snorted a barely suppressed laugh.

To everyone's surprise, the door to the basement opened (inwards) and Caroline stood in it. She was armed with a fantastically dangerous-looking machine gun, incongruously paired with a teal party dress and ballerina shoes. She kept the gun trained on Scott, who dutifully raised his arms. Malia followed suit and Theo didn’t because he was out of sight.

Corey moved a few more steps to remove himself from the line of fire.

“You're afraid of me?” Scott asked, keeping his face humorous. He was trying to be friendly, to put her off-balance, lower her guard, but Corey doubted that it would work. Caroline was used to friendly, what she needed then was for them to be human. People who were friendly in life-threatening circumstances weren’t exactly normal.

“Not just you,” she said, glancing at Malia who bared her teeth at her, complete with fangs and shining blue eyes.

If Caroline had entered a room full of werewolves and werecayotes armed only with a gun or two, then she couldn't be an experienced hunter. She acted stupidly enough to be innocent of terrible crimes. Stupidly enough to be defeated easily.

“No-one has to get hurt.” It was obvious by the practised way in which he recited it that Scott said this very often and it never worked. “Just tell us what you want.”

“I already have what I want.”

“So why are you here?” Malia asked.

“Oh, on a dare of course. My brother thought it would be funny.”

Corey saw Theo raise an eyebrow, then his face shifted into something like a smile.

“He sounds like a jerk,” Scott said, genuinely concerned, “we could kill you.”

“You’re Scott McCall.” Caroline shrugged. “You’re not going to kill me.”

 _Not all of us are Scott McCall,_ Corey thought, watching Theo carefully place one hand on the door, just shy of pushing it.

Scott stared at Caroline for a second, then his eyebrow twitched as if he’d just figured something out.

“I know what you’re here for,” he said, the smile falling off his face, “you want us to forgive you.”

The shock on her face was heartbreaking, even to Corey who had no idea what it meant. It was so real. Her eyes wide, lips trembling slightly before she closed them. A tremor in her hands, translating to the uncertainty in the aim of the gun she was holding. Corey tried to figure out what he’d missed that Scott had not, but he couldn't get a grasp on it. Scott must have noticed some guilt in her and taken a chance, but why would a hunter want forgiveness if she was winning?

Theo threw his weight against the door to slam it shut into her face. It rebounded off the frame, caught by Malia who kicked it all the way open again and pulled a disoriented Caroline into the room by her arms, ripping the gun away from her. The girl screamed when she hit the ground, but rolled onto her feet quickly and reached for a hand-gun at her hip.

Being closest, Corey succeeded in gently twisting the gun out of her hand, but she was fast enough to grab his wrist push him at Scott, using his own weight for momentum. He stumbled into Scott, knocking them both off balance, then scrambled up and out of the way noticing the gun on the ground and kicking it towards the opposite side of the room. Undaunted, Caroline turned to leap for the weapon, but Theo picked it up first, calmly removing the magazine and emptying it on the ground. Malia did likewise with the machine gun and for a moment all they could hear was the rain of lead on a concrete floor.

Caroline stood still in the circle of her captives, but did not seem to recognize that the fight was already lost. Her face betrayed nothing but exhilaration. She was enjoying this, Corey realised with disgust.

“I don’t see why Monroe is so obsessed with you lot,” she said, “most other packs and I’d be dead already.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Scott told her, “please don’t make me.”

Theo slammed the door closed at the sound of footsteps from the other side, then he held it shut against the frame as there was no way to lock it from inside. In the silence that waited to be broken, Caroline began to speak Latin, the same poem that had sent them to sleep the first time and remembering it, Corey immediately started trying to translate. It became the only thing he could focus on, while the world spun and became a darkening void and there were leaves on his eyelids and trees and trees and trees…

He woke up in the same room, but he was alone. Immediately, he felt there was something wrong with that. They wouldn't leave him like this, he was almost certain, but the other possibility was that the rest were dead and he was going to be next. The bullets had been picked up, but bits of camera were still scattered around the floor and he wondered without much hope whether he'd be able to fashion a lock pick from anything here. The knife, which he found was still in his pocket, was possibly slim enough to fit in most locks, but he still needed a pin, and the wires from the camera were too soft. He wished Theo had armed him with lock-picks instead of a knife.

Pacing nervously, he tried to remember what kind of spell Caroline could have used to put them all to sleep. There were incantation-only spells that could make a person disoriented, or help with healing, but there was nothing he knew of that would knock someone out that quickly unless… unless the victim was doing the chanting.

 _That’s why it’s Latin,_ he realised. They’d all been exposed to unreasonable amounts of Latin over the years of researching the various esoteric dangers plaguing Beacon Hills. Automatically trying to translate the phrases, and being supernatural and full of magic, they had unwittingly recited parts of the incantation in their thoughts, casting the spell and sending themselves to sleep. Mason had explained this trick to him when he’d found it, delighted with how clever it was.

As long as he took care not to repeat the words, it wouldn’t work again. A minute after he realised this and was about to start explaining it out loud in the hopes that the others could hear him, the door opened. He panicked, thinking it was Monroe, and she’d already killed Scott, Malia and Theo, but it was only Caroline again, without the victory in her eyes. He had no idea what to think any more so he kept quiet as she leaned against the opposite wall and watched his reaction. She looked grave, her mouth a thin, naturally unhappy line.

“I'm sorry about this, Corey,” she said, and strangely enough it sounded genuine. But then again, so did all proficiently executed lies.

“About what?”

“About your pack. Leaving.”

_Leaving._

_They left him._

Corey took a deep, shuddering breath, not even bothering with disbelief any more. Of course they left. Mason wasn't with them to take his side, to remind them that he existed. He'd never been particularly useful --- mostly by choice, he had to admit --- and if Scott could save his girlfriend and his other most powerful general, then it made sense that they would leave him. The pack would go on, and he would die.

Maybe Mason could finally convince Liam to go to college, just so he wouldn't have to live in that house on his own. Or maybe Liam would convince Mason to leave college and pursue war instead. Neither of those seemed likely, and anyway, Corey would never know. He was about to die and it was desperately sad that he would never know; he would never be a part of it.

“Scott traded me for an exit… but my brother demanded they had to leave one and well, you were dead weight,” Caroline kept talking, “but you know what? Invisibility is wasted on an alpha like him --- you should have joined someone with more than half a brain, you'd have been treasured.”

“Treasured?” He'd never wanted to be treasured for his ability. “Oh, you mean _used_.”

_Why is she still talking?_

“Respected.”

She was trying to make him vilify Scott. And sure, he’d left him for dead but he was also the only thing keeping Mason safe from Monroe and the hunters. He wasn’t going to die denouncing True Alpha Scott McCall.

“Scott’s a good leader,” Corey said.

“Really?”

“Objectively.”

“Huh.”

The pack, his pack, that he had never trusted enough had sold him to hunters, and he was still worrying about them. But this was the _end._ He could not hold the panic back any longer. Sliding down the wall, he brought his knees up to his chest and hugged them, and Caroline looked on, sadly. He turned away from her because she didn’t _have_ to have kidnapped him and therefore had no business being sad about it, and the hypocrisy was making him feel sick with anger.

“Monroe's not going to cross three states just for you, so...” she said. He looked back at her just in time to see her reach into her leather jacket for the hand gun they'd fought over earlier. He saw her swallow, and he knew full well that she would not shoot him. He wasn't afraid, it wasn't real, it didn't make sense.

Then she clicked the safety off and it finally did make sense. If he looked at the world through his own eyes, then the world was ending when he was. He didn’t want to die. And he couldn't breathe now, but then again, he wouldn't _have to_. His heart hammered painfully in his chest, begging him to run, to _do something_ but he was frozen still because if he moved now, then it would definitely end.

“Jesus Christ, Corey,” Caroline sighed in exasperation, and when he blinked the tears away he saw her drop the gun and slide it back under her jacket. “You actually believe they'd leave you.”

 _Just kill me, just kill me, fuck this_.

Fear was _worse._

He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. She wasn’t going to kill him, not _yet_ anyway, and Scott and Theo and Malia were still there, and they had not betrayed him. Was that what it meant?

He was too angry at her to ask why. She didn’t have to do this, Monroe would kill them all soon, why was she making it _worse_?

It didn't even matter if they left him or not, either way the pack always managed to be life-threatening to everyone in it. It would never cease to be that way. He would die for them whether he chose to or not. And that didn’t matter either because the choice he would always make was to be a part of it, even if it was hell. They protected him not because he was weak or useful, but because they loved him, even though he’d spent years refusing to let them. It had only ever been a choice, and he had only ever _refused to make it_.

He smiled, tasting tears, and accepted that. He forced his lungs to take in air, so chaotically he almost choked. He did love them all. If he was going to die, then why not die for that?

“What do you want?” he asked her, his voice even harsher than he’d meant to make it. He was going to have to get past Caroline somehow, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to use force. She was frowning, staring at a spot just left of his head, some distance between them. He asked again, “who are you in all of this?”

“I don't know,” she replied, irritated, “I haven't decided. I just wanted to get to know you guys before I sold you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These chapter titles are getting more and more pretentious, hahahaha


	7. Do Not Ask For Directions, You Know Where You Are

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think this is the next to last chapter? Unless I write an epilogue and I do love writing vague meaningless epilogues.
> 
> There's blood and violence and death in this one (and the next).

Corey tried to organize all of the information he had on Caroline in his head, but most of what she said was lies so he didn’t get very far. She was a hunter. She was a druid. She was miserable and occasionally pretended otherwise. She was a creepy piece of shit. Her brother was a creepy, trigger-happy piece of shit. She was guilty of something terrible, and wasn’t enough of a psychopath to not feel it.

“Then decide. You’re running out of time,” he reminded her, “once Monroe gets here you’re just going to be a killer.”

If he'd been more determined to survive the war and less determined to not get any blood on his hands, he would have made himself invisible and stuck Theo’s knife in her gut. As it was, she would probably kill him before he got within three feet of her. She looked capable of so much more than he could fathom. Monroe's people made a huge deal of werewolves, but the real danger to humanity were the _druids._ They had power nobody really understood. Personified natural disasters waiting to happen.

“Hm, maybe,” she said. “I’m wondering… do you know where the banshee is?”

She was changing the subject which meant that he was on the right track.

“No.” And before he panicked about his heartbeat betraying him he remembered that she wasn't a werewolf and he didn’t, in fact, know where Mason or Lydia were. And this told him that they were still safe. “If you let me call them I could ask. I could… I could tell Mason that I loved him, before…”

He wiped the tears from under his eyes and sniffed. Caroline smiled humourlessly.

“He’ll be better off without your kind around.” She was speaking without conviction, though it still hurt.

Caroline was looking for some kind of redemption, otherwise she wouldn’t be making excuses and risking so much just to talk to them. She’d tried to prove that Scott wasn’t deserving of his powers and his pack. She was trying to give him answers for why he had to die. He grit his teeth and tried not to let the irritation show on his face.

“If Scott was right, and you want forgiveness, then... kidnapping people is probably not the best way to go about getting it.”

“The idea is that you aren’t people.” She furrowed her brows at him, choosing not to contradict that Scott might have been right about her. “You aren’t people, and I’m innocent. If you _are_ a person then…”

“Then what?”

She shook her head, then turned to leave.

_No, no, no, no._

“Why are you working for Monroe?” he asked, desperately.

“I need her power.”

He searched her face in surprise, checking if the words were genuine. It would have been a strange thing to lie about, too simple a statement. But she said it as if she had wanted him to ask, and the conclusion that he came to was that she _w_ _ould_ take forgiveness if she could find it. _Power?_ That was just another excuse.

What she didn't know was that for years, he’d held a grudge against the entire McCall pack for the alpha’s one desperate mistake. He wasn’t going to forgive _her_ any time soon. He didn’t want to.

“Monroe is not powerful,” he said, “she's just a murderer.” _What does that make_ _you?_

Caroline recoiled at his words, which was strange because he thought the statement was obvious. Her head lowered at inch when she looked down at the floor. In the silence that followed with nothing distracting him, Corey attempted not to think about Monroe, horrifying and inhuman, the breeder of people's monstrosity, who had killed children and defended her actions, who was on her way here and once she arrived the best he could hope for was a quick death.

He pushed the thought aside, with some difficulty.

“What do you think powerful is, then?” Caroline asked. “Is it not wielding an army? Killing, and getting away with it? Filling vaults with guns, and money to buy more guns?”

“Hm, no. Those things can be taken away.” He had known this since Theo lost his own haphazardly manufactured pack. “Unlike the kind of powerful where people follow you without fear. You know, the _Disney_ version.”

“And you think Scott has that kind of power?” she asked, like she had rehearsed this, like she knew exactly what he had been going to say. She played confidence well.

Corey shrugged. It was the best he could do without outright lying and she was looking for an obvious lie. But her face went blank and he knew that he’d failed.

“At least… take me where the rest are,” he pleaded, hesitantly, “please? I don’t want to die alone.”

Caroline narrowed her eyes.

“Okay.”

She reached into a coat pocket and took out an old cell-phone, then looking him in the eyes she pressed a button. The room disappeared into darkness. He reached out to where he remembered the wall was for balance, then heard Caroline whisper softly, “you’re not doing to die at all”. He did not move, as panic had frozen his limbs. He searched for Caroline in the dark, but couldn't see her.

She urgently grabbed his elbow and pulled him towards the exit. He wanted to struggle, he wanted to be capable of doing something for Scott, Theo, and Malia and wondered whether he should be reaching for his knife. But a weapon wouldn't help him with understanding what was going on, and besides, she was armed with a gun.

“I’m going to save you. Only you,” she said, pre-emptively, “I can't get away with more.”

It was possible that she was telling the truth, and it was also possible that she was going to shoot him and bury his body in the back yard only it would be more convenient for her if he walked there himself. He followed her silently up a staircase. There was shouting in some other part of the building, and Caroline quickened her pace. It would make sense. He was the least valuable of the bunch and she would forgive herself, if she killed three people but saved one.

He did not want to be the only survivor.

“If the others are here, I can't leave them.”

“You think they need you?”

Corey stopped, yanking his elbow out of her grip. He could see the impatience on her face even through the darkness, as some faint lights from the outside were getting through into the corridor. He could hear the rain pattering on the windows, gusts of wind attempting to smash through. He could leave and see Mason again. Marry him. Graduate. Build his life on betrayal.

“What if they do?”

“There are dozens of hunters in this house, Corey, you go back there you’re going to die.”

She reached out and opened a door, and the cold and ozone of a storm flooded in, along with light from a garden lamp. If he took three steps forward, he would be out. Caroline held the door open, spots of rain colouring her clothes darker.

Corey turned on his heel, ready to sprint back down the corridor in search of the rest of the pack, but someone was already standing in the way. A shapeless figure at first, then transformed by the meagre light into something horrible.

“Where are _you_ off to?”

It was Caroline's brother, clicking the safety off a handgun. Corey backed away towards the door, making himself invisible and hoping the rain wouldn't give him away. The guy made an annoyed 'tsk' sound, but Corey himself did not seem to concern him all that much.

“No,” Caroline said. Her brother, without Corey to aim at, pointed the gun at Caroline, his other hand tearing lightly at his hair, air hissing through his teeth. Caroline spoke again, “just let me have this.”

“Maddy, why?” he asked, without meeting her direct, unsettling stare, “you said you didn't know them.”

“I didn't know Jake Remington either and I still can’t get the blood off my hands.”

 _Oh,_ _this explains the guilt_ _._ Corey watched the exchange, pressing his back into the corridor wall, trying to figure out what to do. This was far too complicated to be entirely theatre. Caroline had actually meant to let him go, and she was defending this decision with a gun in her face. He began to feel sorry for her, then shook his head remembering that she had still meant to sell Scott and the others to Monroe.

“How many times--- he was a _monster_! THEY’RE ALL MONSTERS! My God, they don’t even have _souls_. They killed---”

As long as they were distracted, he could probably sneak past the guy and maybe even rescue everyone else.

“I just realized, you know.” Caroline laughed, and it was a bizarre and careful sound that made him pause. “That I shouldn't take your moral compass seriously, it's not convincing any more. But I swear, I’ll let her kill the others, just let me have this.” Her brother was still pointing a gun at her and suddenly, Corey desperately did not want to have to stand there and watch her die. He removed the knife from his pocket and found the button that would free the switch-blade. _You can do this, Corey, come on, you’re not a coward, no matter what Theo says._

Carefully, he began to sidestep towards the man with the gun, dodging one angrily thrown out arm to get past him, thankful that the noise of the storm was louder than his footsteps.

“I took care of you, Maddy, I fucking _saved_ you from that darkness that you tried to bury yourself in. You can’t betray me now.”

Corey was almost a metre away when Caroline’s brother took a deep breath, loudly enough that Corey could hear it over the rain and the storm, and then the gun was still and the man squared his shoulders.

Caroline was smiling, with that humourless expression she’d been wearing earlier, and Corey realized just in time that she was attempting to prepare herself for death. Barely even thinking about it, he flipped the switch-blade open and quickly, silently, sank it into the man’s shoulder.

He could almost hear it squelch. The strange, soft pressure of flesh giving underneath the blade, and a slight deflection when it hit bone, twisting the knife downwards. Blood began to creep over the steel, towards his fingers so he let go of the handle, turned away and ran further into the house. Rounding a corner, he stopped, pressing his back to the wall and looked down at his hands. He couldn’t find any blood, but it was _there_ he could _feel_ it, thick and dark and sticky. He could hear the man howling in rage and pain, the noise echoing down the corridor.

He forced himself to take a calming, deep breath, but in the next moment a gunshot made him startle so that was pointless. For five seconds, all he could hear was his own heartbeat.

Caroline screamed; a desperate, terrible sound.

Corey curled his hands into fists, cursing at himself, then looked back over the corner to the entrance hall. She was kneeling in a pool of blood that was slowly expanding from her brother’s body, her head cradled in blood-soaked hands, red dripping from her hair.

“HELP ME!” she shouted.

Corey backed away, horrified. He’d saved her. Then she’d shot her brother dead.


	8. INTERLUDE (LYDIA)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought Lydia was not getting nearly enough attention, so here we go! I wrote this as just as short interlude to explain what happened with Caroline because I couldn't find a way to actually write it into the story itself, so it's a bit of a mess and kinda pointless!

“Turn right here.”

“Are you sure? Google says-”

“I’m sure, _turn right._ ”

Lydia was barely holding it together as it was, she didn’t need Mason panic driving the car into a tree on top of it. But Mason knew better than to doubt her twice, and he swerved into a narrow paved drive that took them to an imposing set of iron gates. Lydia shattered it with a negligible amount of effort; this close to death, her power was immeasurable.

Mason noticed, because of course he did.

“Someone just died in there, didn’t they?” His hands began to shake.

“Three minutes ago, but it’s no-one we know,” she reassured him. “Find us a place to hide the car, we’ll need to walk the rest of the way.”

Mason turned off the headlights and continued to inch along the drive at walking pace, wary of traps and hunters, until they found a small grove off to one side and parked behind some bushes. Squinting through the freezing rain, Mason grabbed a baseball bat from the back seat, and a small emergency backpack full of medical supplies that they both hoped would prove useless. Lydia grabbed a hair tie and a pair of mirrored gloves that would help focus her power in case she didn’t feel like toppling any buildings.

“The cavalry arrives,” she said, tying her hair back into a sensible braid while Mason double-tied his shoelaces. He smiled at her nervously.

Lydia led them through the front entrance to were the death drew her, but as soon as she opened the door the feeling changed to a suffocating miasma of magical power. There was a body, laid out peacefully in the middle of the entrance hall, hands crossed over the chest and eyes closed. He had a neat, circular hole in the centre of his forehead, and a thin layer of blood spread around him. Caroline was drawing a finger through the pool, disturbing the glassy surface in complicated patterns.

The floorboards underfoot were sprouting living branches that flickered with accelerated growth.

Caroline was barely recognisable, wrapped as she was in brambles and insects, but she looked up when Lydia and Mason entered. Her face was only sorrow.

“You know what I can do with a sacrifice?” she asked, blinking as a dead hummingbird crawled over her left eye. Lydia couldn’t think of anything she wanted to know less. Whatever this was, the pack were still alive and the important thing was getting to them.

“Stay behind me,” Lydia muttered to Mason, whose shock had quickly turned to horror at the sight of the body. “When I tell you to, run past her and get to the second floor. Head east.”

“Okay, okay,” he breathed, swinging the bat round in nervous circles, “right, I have to get to the others. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to claim the sacrifice.”

“You’re going to _what_?”

Lydia ignored him. Caroline had already trapped a dozen hunters in vines over the walls of the corridor, probably just to keep them out of the way as she worked her magic. Lydia could defend herself, but Mason‘s presence would make that more difficult.

“The last of them,” Caroline was muttering, “the last of them, gone, I’m all alone.”

A briar began to push up the floorboards, soaking up the bloody pool, buds of black rose flowers blossoming beautifully and quickly overrunning with spiders.

“Oh my god this is insane, Lydia I can’t leave you here!”

It's like he'd never seen a druid eat spiders before. Lydia sighed in frustration; no-one ever remembered that she was about ten times more powerful than anyone else in the pack. Sometimes she could use this to her advantage, but other times it was only annoying.

“Thanks for the chivalry, Mason," she said patiently, "but I really need you out of here so that I don’t accidentally kill you. So when I say _run,_ you’re going to _run_! Find Corey, second floor, head east.”

“How do you...oh.”

She turned away from him immediately, because the look on his face would only hurt, and concentrated on the body in the middle of the room, fighting past the revulsion and wrongness of it. The power of the dying soul was still untethered; the spell that Caroline was working to bind it to her will would take hours, so if Lydia could channel all that energy at once and spend it harmlessly, there would be nothing left for Caroline to claim. It wouldn't even be difficult.

“Please,” the druid said, seeing what Lydia was about to do, “get out of the way. I’ll let you through, just let me _have this._ I need _something._ ”

“Why would I let you have anything,” Lydia smiled sweetly, “when you’ve hurt my friends?”


	9. I'm Only An Outsider If I Believe It

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's over it's over yay. I hope it makes sense!
> 
> Thanks to anyone who read this, and even more thanks to anyone who left kudos. You are lovely.

Old, rotting carpets with mole-eaten holes littering the edges covered the floors of the house. Corey ran past dozens of pictures on the walls, still life and landscapes framed in plaster filigree that he could see only thanks to the broken boards that shuttered the windows. The light was faint, composed of jagged polygons. Opening one door, he found a room full of ghostly furniture covered in white sheets and backed out fast, almost tripping over a broken threshold. If this was a home, then it was dead.

Hunters ran past him, heading towards where Caroline was still screaming incomprehensibly, and he headed the other way, more careful now to make sure no-one ran into him. Finally, he heard a voice from somewhere above, muffled by the walls, but recognisable as Theo’s, “ _this place is a fucking horror movie_.”

Corey almost cried with relief; they were alive. He doubled back on himself until he found a set of stairs, then got lost again for a moment before the thunder of running footsteps, a loud thud and the sound of smashing glass gave him a semblance of direction.

“Theo?” he said softly, side-stepping a broken vase. If the noise was someone else then he’d rather not be heard, and if it was the pack then they would hear him. He didn’t get a reply, but he found them anyway, engaged in a tense stand-off with a group of five hunters. The distance between them was close enough that, should the hunters open fire, at least one or two of them would be torn apart by the werepeople. Scott, Malia and Theo would still die, either of their wounds or wolfsbane poisoning, but the hunters were too anxious to shoot, and the pack were only waiting for an opportunity to attack without the risk of being shredded by machine guns. If any more hunters happened across them, it would end in a one-sided massacre.

They need a distraction that would draw away the gunfire. Corey smiled regretfully, but hesitated only for a second. He could _save_ them. He could pay back that debt he owed, for all their unrequited caring. He let himself flicker back into view, reaching for a brass coat-stand that stood by the window to the right. He didn't have to be useless.

“Don’t,” Scott said, his eyes still steadily focused on the hunters, and Corey wondered if he was speaking to him. But there was a kind of despair on the alpha’s face that told him Scott did not have any other plan for how to get out of the situation. All Corey had to do was make sure all five hunters were startled enough that they turned their guns towards him and away from the others. Scott, Theo and Malia would take care of the rest.

He smashed the coat-stand into the wall with all his strength. The hardest part would be raising his voice.

“GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM MY PACK!” he cried, then dived down to the floor in a hail of bullets and plaster. It didn’t matter that he didn’t quite mean it.

“Corey, stay awake.”

“No,” Corey heard himself say; being awake _hurt_. He would have liked to drift off into oblivion. The voice had been Scott’s however, and Corey didn’t want Scott anywhere near him. He opened his eyes just as the alpha was about to take his hand and quickly pulled it away.

“Okay, okay,” Scott said, holding his hands up, “I’m only trying to help.”

Corey would rather suffer.

“Can you stand?”

“Shit!” Malia yelled, and Corey saw her recoil from an arrow lodged in her shoulder, then fall down after another struck her ankle. Scott was already roaring down the corridor towards the attacker, sailing over a pile of unconscious hunters. Hearing more gunshots and the whistle of crossbow bolts overhead, Corey decided he should probably at least move away from the area.

He turned on his side, brought himself up on his elbows and spilled a gallon of blood onto the floor. There was a horrible, unbearable sharp pain in his chest that he assumed was a bullet or three. A fractal cracked his vision, so he closed his eyes.

“Uh.”

“Come _on_! If you’re gonna be useless at least stay out of the way.” Theo said, hauling him upright and pushing him towards Malia. “Get in that room, stay quiet and, for the love of God do _not_ bleed out.”

Theo slammed the door closed, already ducking under another crossbow bolt. Careful not to fall over, Corey sat down on the floor and pressed his forearms to his chest to keep his insides on the inside. Every other ounce of effort he spent trying not to pass out. Malia swore viciously at the door, then limped towards one of the shrouded cabinets and pulled the sheet off. He watched bleakly as she sat down between him and the door, then reached behind her shoulder and snapped the arrowhead off the bolt.

He squeezed his eyes shut before she pulled it out, but he still heard her hiss in pain and the soft rasp as it slid out of bone.

“Stay awake, Corey,” she reminded him, “you’re gonna be fine. Here, you need to stop the bleeding.”

He opened his eyes, finding that she’d piled strips of torn white cloth next to him. She had very efficiently tied a strip around her shoulder, where it was already soaking through with red, and was moving onto patching up the hole in her ankle. He wished he could have come up with a plan that hadn’t ended in her being shot.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“What the hell for?”

“This is my fault. I’m sure I could have--- It’s my fault you’re hurt.”

“No, it’s not,” she said. She picked up a strip of cloth and began to tie it round his head, because he was refusing to move. “Didn’t you just save us? Your head is bleeding, you’re probably confused.”

A bullet must have just brushed his skull, and at once, the horror of what he’d done descended on him. It was unbearable, the weight of just how badly it could have ended, that it could have been the last thing he’d ever done. It still might be. He didn’t have much time.

He flinched at the staccato ringing of gunfire right outside the door and Malia silently hopped onto her toes and turned to face it with fangs and claws. She was still dripping blood onto the floor.

“All this time I’d been acting like I wasn’t part of the pack…” he explained, “like I hated you, even, and then you made the trip here anyway for, like, the vaguest of threats. And now you’re hurt.”

“Shut up,” she whispered, still watching the door. Something heavy slammed into it, almost breaking the hinges off, then the fight continued further down the corridor and Malia breathed a sigh of relief, then turned back to him and glared. “ _Do_ you hate us?”

“Of course not.”

“You’re lying,” she informed him, looking stricken.

“I don’t hate you.” Corey smiled. The pain was fading. “There, that wasn’t a lie.”

“Okay, but,” she shook her head, “oh, just _some of us._ We’re a weird bunch though, to be fair... Shit. Stay awake, Corey, focus. Shit.”

He dragged his eyelids open. She was attempting to shake him awake, wincing as his pain flowed through her wrist.

“Do you _want_ to be part of the pack?” she asked.

“Not if… if I don’t deserve it.”

“Why the fuck would you not deserve it? Who told you …”

He didn’t have the strength to explain, but an understanding dawned on her face, and she growled softly at the ground. He wished he _could_ explain, since she was obviously making assumptions and he couldn’t be sure that they were correct. And if he died now he'd never have a chance to make them understand.

“OK, I gotta go.” Her gaze unfocused as she listened to something far away. “Mason and Lydia are here, so don’t die.”

She let go of his hand and ran out of the room and the pain washed over him again. _Mason is here. Why is Mason here?_ He considered binding the bullet wound (or wounds, he really didn’t want to check) in his chest, or at least checking to see how badly damaged his head was, but the thought was exhausting. It would probably be best to remove the bullets first anyway, and he was definitely not doing _that._ He didn’t want to die but he was prepared to accept it if it meant not having to move. His body would stitch itself back together, it always did. He could wait.

He contemplated this, trying to ignore the pain, and suddenly Mason was there. He stood in the doorway, framed in lightning, holding a baseball bat in one hand.

 _Oh,_ Corey thought, or maybe he’d whispered it, _I must be dead._

“You’re not dead,” Mason said, though the panic in his voice betrayed him, “you’re not even dying. You’re stronger than this.”

Corey sat on the porch of the Ennits’ estate with Mason, waiting for their greatest enemy walk into a trap. Monroe was meant to arrive to find the building empty; then she would be disappeared into the underground, her death faked and her army dismantled. That was too much to hope for, however, and Corey was careful with hope these days.

“I think I killed someone,” he said, because the silence was too anxious and he reckoned it would be best to get over all the anxiety at once. Instead of looking at him with distrust as Corey had expected, Mason pulled him closer.

“What are you talking about?” Mason asked, his voice on the verge of humour. “Are you being metaphorical or something? The only body we found had been shot and I’m pretty certain you wouldn’t touch a gun with a ten foot pole.”

Corey huddled even closer to him, for the warmth; the storm had ended but it had left an unpleasant damp chill in the night air.

“I stabbed Caroline’s brother and he... he was distracted, and Caroline shot him... in the head.”

“Did you make her pull the trigger?”

“No, but-”

“Then you didn’t kill him.”

“I still feel like I did.”

“Then trust me,” Mason said, gently tracing circles on the back of his wrist so that Corey wouldn’t take his own skin off. “You saved her. You saved a girl who was going to sell you to a genocidal maniac.”

Corey considered that for a minute. He didn’t care much about her, now that she wasn’t a danger to him, hadn’t even wanted to speak to her when he found out that she’d been captured. He hadn’t been saving her as much as he’d been saving himself from having to see a person shot right in front of him.

“I don’t understand why I did... I guess she was trying to be less horrible and… I still hate her, but she would have been the eighth person I knew that I’ve had to watch die, and that's not normal, and I want it to stop. I hated it Mason, I hated it so much. The stabbing I mean.”

“That’s uh, a good thing, I think,” Mason said, “I mean, that neither of us are used to it. I'm glad we're still counting.”

“Is it going to end tonight?” Corey asked.

Mason was silent for too long before he answered, “let's just hope for now.”

“I’m not sure that I can. But I'm not leaving your side until it ends,” Corey whispered, meaning it in the most literal sense. Mason laughed a little hysterically.

“Corey, you're not leaving until the world ends.”

Tamora Monroe, leader of the greatest army that supernatural creatures had ever faced, hopped easily out of the helicopter parked on the grass in front of the circular driveway, rifle slung over her shoulder. There was a gleeful kind of lightness to her step. It was dark, so she didn’t see that the first hunter she approached was not a hunter at all.

Greeting her amiably, Theo grabbed her head in one swift, fluid movement and broke her neck, then let the body fall at his feet.

Lydia screamed, sending a shock-wave rippling over the grounds. The sound, though cut short, was shrill and horribly unnatural, and she crumpled to her knees in shock clapping both hands to her mouth. Mason ran over to help her, gathering her in his arms as she sobbed and shook, and Corey followed, gently taking her hand and making the three of them invisible in case Monroe had brought back-up.

The whooshing of helicopter blades died down slowly, leaving the night silent and still. The pilot – having witnessed the murder – jumped out of the vehicle, brandishing a crossbow without really knowing what to aim it at.

“You killed her,” the she whispered, frantically looking around at the masked figures gathered around the lawn, “you killed her. What… what the hell?”

Theo tore the mask off his face to reveal an unpleasant grin, and Scott finally reacted, tackling him to the ground before Theo could get to the woman. Malia had her by the neck in the next second, arm twisted behind her back, the crossbow falling to the ground uselessly. She pushed her over to the helicopter and checked the interior for more hunters before turning back to them and calling the all clear.

“It’s over, Scott,” Theo drawled, still pinned under Scott’s knee, “the witch is dead. This was the only way to end this, you _know_ that.”

Corey breathed a sigh of relief and shifted back to the visible plane. Lydia was still shaking, her power rippling her image like a fun-house mirror, but she was fighting to calm herself down. While Corey somewhat understood Theo’s reasoning, he didn’t understand why he couldn’t have given Lydia a little warning at least.

“No! No, it fucking wasn’t!” Scott shouted, but he helped Theo back up before quietly adding, “get _out of my sight_.”

Theo dusted himself off and tipped his head to the side, exhilaration still evident on his face.

“What, you’re kicking me out?” He smirked, and then stilled like a deer in headlights when Scott did not disagree. “Holy shit, you’re doing this _now_?” Then he schooled his face and laughed lightly, _“_ I guess I’ve outlived my usefulness now that I’ve won the war for you.”

The rest of the pack stared in shock, but Scott’s face only betrayed a cold, simmering rage. His hands were curled into fists, and every time Lydia made a sound his shoulders trembled.

“I told you, Theo. You hurt _anyone_ in my pack and you’re out.”

“Lydia’s fine!” Theo protested, snorting in disbelief. “She’s seen death before, and she’s going to see death again, it’s about time she got used to it don’t you think?”

Corey whispered something awful under his breath, and he heard Mason do the same. Theo knew what it felt like to die, he should have _understood._ Malia made a move as if to attack him, but couldn’t risk letting go of the hunter.

“Fuck off back to hell, Theo,” she spat at him instead, baring her teeth. Theo shot her a tiny, sarcastic smile in reply.

“Love you too, sis,” he said.

When her terror had simmered down to anger, Lydia wiped her eyes, and a trickle of blood from her mouth where she’d bit her lip trying to suppress Monroe’s death.

“I don’t _want to_ get used to it!” she said, her voice hoarse but confident. “We’re not an army, Theo, the pack is about more than just winning the war.” She paused, stood, and brushed a hand through her hair to unstick it from her face, vengeance in her eyes. Scott hesitated at the reminder that it had been a war they were fighting. Theo’s callousness was a mask, and Corey wished that he’d take it off for once so that Scott could actually be allowed to get to know him, and Corey could defend him without seeming heartless.

Then Lydia took hold of Corey’s hand again and squeezed it reassuringly (or was it apologetically?), and before he could even look at her in alarm it was too late. “And aside from the cold-blooded murder that you just made me live through: you think Corey would have run into gunfire to prove his worth if you hadn’t constantly been trying to convince him that he wasn't enough?”

It took Corey a few seconds to realize the implications of what she’d said, but when he did he decided to shut that line of thought off immediately. He might even have been successful, if Monroe's corpse wasn't lying on the grass in the middle of it all, and if Lydia didn’t have that subtle look of terror in her eyes.

_Lydia is always right. She can’t be right._

She couldn’t be right. How dare she think that she understood him?

She couldn’t possibly know; she belonged with the pack effortlessly. All of them did. They couldn’t know what it was like to sit on the sidelines and wonder if anyone cared about or even noticed them. _Theo could_. He’d lived that reality for years, and Corey couldn’t condemn him to that again, even if he had made mistakes. Countless, awful mistakes.

_Do you think she's right, Theo? Did I internalise everything horrible you've ever said to me? I thought I didn't trust you. I thought it would be fine as long as I never trusted you._

Fearfully, he glanced at Theo, then immediately looked away when their eyes met. Theo was unreadable.

Lydia couldn’t be right. She couldn’t be, because Corey could always tell when Theo lied. He made his own choices, and he’d saved them because it had been the only way. He couldn’t let them take that from him. _He could tell when Theo lied._ He could always tell. They weren’t going to make this about him, he couldn’t let them. He just had to _stop thinking_ and it would be fine.

“Don’t make this about me,” he pleaded quietly, then he took a few careful steps back before Mason caught his shoulders and held him fast.

“Corey, just let him go,” Mason whispered, his voice tired and carrying with it a hint of resentment that made Corey’s heart skip in panic.

“But, it’s not _enough-_ ”

Theo interrupted, twisting his face into a horrible sneer. “Don’t bother.” He rolled his shoulders and shook out his hands as he usually did before shifting into a wolf. “It’s been fucking lovely knowing you all.”

_It’s not enough to justify exile._


End file.
